Rise of the Dutch Republic, The: ‘A History,’ by John Lothrop Motley. First printed in 1856, at the author’s expense,—because the great publishers, Mr. Murray included, would not risk such an enterprise for the unknown historian,—it proved an immediate popular success; and was followed by a French translation (supervised with an introduction by Guizot) in 1859, and soon after by Dutch, German, and Russian translations. James Anthony Froude, in the Westminster Review, characterized the new work as “a history as complete as industry and genius can make it … of the first twenty years of the Revolt of the United Provinces; of the period in which those provinces finally conquered their independence and established the Republic of Holland.” Of the ten years’ preparation, half were spent by the author with his family abroad, studying in the libraries and State archives of Europe. Writing from Brussels to Oliver Wendell Holmes, he says: “I haunt this place because it is my scene,—my theatre … for representing scenes which have long since vanished, and which no more enter the minds of the men and women who are actually moving across its pavement than if they had occurred in the moon…. I am at home in any cemetery. With the fellows of the sixteenth century I am on the most familiar terms…. I go, day after day, to the archives here (as I went all summer at The Hague) studying the old letters and documents…. It is, however, not without its amusement, in a moldy sort of way, this reading of dead letters. It is something to read the real, bona-fide signs-manual of such fellows as William of Orange, Count Egmont, Alexander Farnese, Philip II., Cardinal Granvelle, and the rest of them. It gives a ‘realizing sense,’ as the Americans have it.” This “realizing sense” is what Motley put into his published record of the struggles of the Protestant “beggars of Holland” with the grandees of Spain, throwing off the yoke of their bigoted ruler, Philip, in spite of the utmost cruelties of mediæval warfare and the Church’s Inquisition practiced by Philip’s favorite general, the notorious Duke of Alva.