“I hope I am one of those,” he writes to me from the Hague, in 1872, “who ‘fortune’s buffets and rewards can take with equal thanks.’  I am quite aware that I have had far more than I deserve of political honors, and they might have had my post as a voluntary gift on my part had they remembered that I was an honorable man, and not treated me as a detected criminal deserves to be dealt with.”

Mr. Sumner naturally felt very deeply what he considered the great wrong done to his friend.  He says:—­

“How little Mr. Motley merited anything but respect and courtesy from the secretary is attested by all who know his eminent position in London, and the service he rendered to his country.  Already the London press, usually slow to praise Americans when strenuous for their country, has furnished its voluntary testimony.  The ’Daily News’ of August 16, 1870, spoke of the insulted minister in these terms:—­

“’We are violating no confidence in saying that all the hopes of Mr. Motley’s official residence in England have been amply fulfilled, and that the announcement of his unexpected and unexplained recall was received with extreme astonishment and unfeigned regret.  The vacancy he leaves cannot possibly be filled by a minister more sensitive to the honor of his government, more attentive to the interests of his country, and more capable of uniting the most vigorous performance of his public duties with the high-bred courtesy and conciliatory tact and temper that make those duties easy and successful.  Mr. Motley’s successor will find his mission wonderfully facilitated by the firmness and discretion that have presided over the conduct of American affairs in this country during too brief a term, too suddenly and unaccountably concluded.’”

No man can escape being found fault with when it is necessary to make out a case against him.  A diplomatist is watched by the sharpest eyes and commented on by the most merciless tongues.  The best and wisest has his defects, and sometimes they would seem to be very grave ones if brought up against him in the form of accusation.  Take these two portraits, for instance, as drawn by John Quincy Adams.  The first is that of Stratford Canning, afterwards Lord Stratford de Redcliffe:—­

“He is to depart to-morrow.  I shall probably see him no more.  He is a proud, high-tempered Englishman, of good but not extraordinary parts; stubborn and punctilious, with a disposition to be overbearing, which I have often been compelled to check in its own way.  He is, of all the foreign ministers with whom I have had occasion to treat, the man who has most severely tried my temper.  Yet he has been long in the diplomatic career, and treated with governments of the most opposite characters.  He has, however, a great respect for his word, and there is nothing false about him.  This is an excellent quality for a negotiator.  Mr. Canning is a man of forms, studious of courtesy, and tenacious of private morals.  As a diplomatic man, his great want is suppleness, and his great virtue is sincerity.”

The second portrait is that of the French minister, Hyde de Neuville:—­