John Lothrop Motley, A Memoir — Complete. Oliver Wendell Holmes

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      He goes on to describe, under the perfectly transparent mask of his hero, the course of his studies. “To poetry, like most infants, I devoted most of my time.” From modern poetry he went back to the earlier sources, first with the idea of systematic reading and at last through Chaucer and Gower and early ballads, until he lost himself “in a dismal swamp of barbarous romances and lying Latin chronicles. I got hold of the Bibliotheca Monastica, containing a copious account of Anglo-Norman authors, with notices of their works, and set seriously to reading every one of them.” One profit of his antiquarianism, however, was, as he says, his attention to foreign languages—French, Spanish, German, especially in their earliest and rudest forms of literature. From these he ascended to the ancient poets, and from Latin to Greek. He would have taken up the study of the Oriental languages, but for the advice of a relative, who begged him seriously to turn his attention to history. The paragraph which follows must speak for itself as a true record under a feigned heading.

      “The groundwork of my early character was plasticity and fickleness.

       I was mortified by this exposure of my ignorance, and disgusted with

       my former course of reading. I now set myself violently to the

       study of history. With my turn of mind, and with the preposterous

       habits which I had been daily acquiring, I could not fail to make as

       gross mistakes in the pursuit of this as of other branches of

       knowledge. I imagined, on setting out, a system of strict and

       impartial investigation of the sources of history. I was inspired

       with the absurd ambition, not uncommon to youthful students, of

       knowing as much as their masters. I imagined it necessary for me,

       stripling as I was, to study the authorities; and, imbued with the

       strict necessity of judging for myself, I turned from the limpid

       pages of the modern historians to the notes and authorities at the

       bottom of the page. These, of course, sent me back to my monastic

       acquaintances, and I again found myself in such congenial company to

       a youthful and ardent mind as Florence of Worcester and Simeon of

       Durham, the Venerable Bede and Matthew Paris; and so on to Gregory

       and Fredegarius, down to the more modern and elegant pages of

       Froissart, Hollinshed, Hooker, and Stowe. Infant as I was, I

       presumed to grapple with masses of learning almost beyond the

       strength of the giants of history. A spendthrift of my time and

       labor, I went out of my way to collect materials, and to build for

       myself, when I should have known that older and abler architects had

       already appropriated all that was worth preserving; that the edifice

       was built, the quarry exhausted, and that I was, consequently, only

       delving amidst rubbish.

       “This course of study was not absolutely without its advantages.

       The mind gained a certain proportion of vigor even by this exercise

       of its faculties, just as my bodily health would have been improved

       by transporting the refuse ore of a mine from one pit to another,

       instead of coining the ingots which lay heaped before my eyes.

       Still, however, my time was squandered. There was a constant want

       of fitness and concentration of my energies. My dreams of education

       were boundless, brilliant, indefinite; but alas! they were only

       dreams. There was nothing accurate and defined in my future course

       of life. I was ambitious and conceited, but my aspirations were

       vague and shapeless. I had crowded together the most gorgeous and

       even some of the most useful and durable materials for my woof, but

       I had no pattern, and consequently never began to weave.

       “I had not made the discovery that an individual cannot learn, nor

       be, everything; that the world is a factory in which each individual

       must perform his portion of work:—happy enough if he can choose it

       according to his taste and talent, but must renounce the desire of

       observing or superintending the whole operation. …

       “From studying and investigating the sources of history with my own

       eyes, I went a step further; I refused the guidance of modern

       writers; and proceeding from one point of presumption to another, I

       came to the magnanimous conviction that I could not know history as

       I ought to know it unless I wrote it for myself. …

       “It would be tedious and useless to enlarge upon СКАЧАТЬ