EDMUND QUINCY. 445 



EDMUND QUINCY. 



Just on the verge of the ninety-eighth year of the Academy, the 

 painful intelligence was received of the sudden decease of one of 

 its most esteemed members, who had served for several years as its 

 Treasurer. Mr. Edmund Quincy descended from a family among the 

 earliest to leave Great Britain for the purpose of settling upon the soil 

 of Massachusetts, and which has actually fulfilled that object on to 

 three centuries, continuously. The second son of Josiah Quincy and 

 the grandson of Josiah Quincy, known as the Junior, both of them 

 doing honor to the name under high political responsibilities, Edmund 

 did not fail to maintain their reputation, though not precisely in the 

 same way. When nine years of age, he was sent to Phillips Academy 

 at Andover, for preparation to enter Harvard College ; and in 1827 

 he issued from that institution with honors indicating a fair promise 

 of distinction in his later years. That promise was honorably fulfilled. 



At the outset of life, the usual question presents itself to educated 

 men in New England, what of three professions they decide to take. 

 Mr. Quincy preferred the law ; but, though he went through the pre- 

 liminary preparations, he developed less taste for it than for the culti- 

 vation of general literature and the occupation of a writer. Hence it 

 happened that through an elaborate experience he gradually mastered 

 a style of composition marked not less for its peculiar felicity than for 

 its accuracy and point. 



Mr. Quincy married early, and then settled himself in one of the 

 ancestral mansions in Dedham, which had come in due course of in- 

 heritance to the possession of his father. For a short period, it looked 

 as if there might be danger of his subsiding into the respectable but 

 somnolent career of a fastidious critic about town. His early effort 

 naturally could hardly be more than ephemeral productions which get 

 mingled with more or less of the platitudes that shine for a moment 

 and forthwith are seen no more. In order fully to draw out his vigor, 

 there was need of some strong appliance in the living and acting world 

 around him. Just the thing happened in its most striking aspect, 

 when in the month of November, 1837, there came the ghastly intelli- 

 gence from the town of Alton, in the State of Illinois, that a respect- 

 able clergyman had there been deliberately murdered by a ruthless 

 mob solely on account of his persisting to substitute a second printing- 

 press, with the purpose of exposing the wrongfulness of negro slavery, 

 for an earlier one which had been ruthlessly destroyed. . Perhaps no 

 single event in the history of the long struggle that followed stirred 



