graceful in movement and gesture, and there was something marked and admirable in the set of his head on his shoulders,”—­a peculiar elegance which was most noticeable in those later days when I knew him.  Lady Byron long afterwards spoke of him as more like her husband in appearance than any other person she had met; but Mr. Phillips, who remembers the first bloom of his boyhood and youth, thinks he was handsomer than any portrait of Byron represents the poet.  “He could not have been eleven years old,” says the same correspondent, “when he began writing a novel.  It opened, I remember, not with one solitary horseman, but with two, riding up to an inn in the valley of the Housatonic.  Neither of us had ever seen the Housatonic, but it sounded grand and romantic.  Two chapters were finished.”

There is not much remembered of the single summer he passed at Mr. Green’s school at Jamaica Plain.  From that school he went to Round Hill, Northampton, then under the care of Mr. Cogswell and Mr. Bancroft.  The historian of the United States could hardly have dreamed that the handsome boy of ten years was to take his place at the side of his teacher in the first rank of writers in his own department.  Motley came to Round Hill, as one of his schoolmates tells me, with a great reputation, especially as a declaimer.  He had a remarkable facility for acquiring languages, excelled as a reader and as a writer, and was the object of general admiration for his many gifts.  There is some reason to think that the flattery he received was for a time a hindrance to his progress and the development of his character.  He obtained praise too easily, and learned to trust too much to his genius.  He had everything to spoil him,—­beauty, precocious intelligence, and a personal charm which might have made him a universal favorite.  Yet he does not seem to have been generally popular at this period of his life.  He was wilful, impetuous, sometimes supercilious, always fastidious.  He would study as he liked, and not by rule.  His school and college mates believed in his great possibilities through all his forming period, but it may be doubted if those who counted most confidently on his future could have supposed that he would develop the heroic power of concentration, the long-breathed tenacity of purpose, which in after years gave effect to his brilliant mental endowments.  “I did wonder,” says Mr. Wendell Phillips, “at the diligence and painstaking, the drudgery shown in his historical works.  In early life he had no industry, not needing it.  All he cared for in a book he caught quickly,—­the spirit of it, and all his mind needed or would use.  This quickness of apprehension was marvellous.  “I do not find from the recollections of his schoolmates at Northampton that he was reproached for any grave offences, though he may have wandered beyond the prescribed boundaries now and then, and studied according to his inclinations rather than by rule.  While at that school he made one acquisition much less common then than now,—­a knowledge of the German language and some degree of acquaintance with its literature, under the guidance of one of the few thorough German scholars this country then possessed, Mr. George Bancroft.