EDMUND QUINCY. 447 



the jjoor man for no other reason than the fact itself of either posi- 

 tion, it became his work not to spare the numerous chiss of tliose who 

 make these labors their sole occupation. So long as the slave re- 

 mained in chains, the demagogues were mostly arrayed on the side of 

 the masters. It was this class that it became the business of Mr. 

 Quincy to assault, and he did not spare them. How much work he 

 did as a regular contributor to the chief anti-slavery presses for a long 

 series of years can be understood only from the collection from them 

 made by himself and enclosed in a series of ponderous volumes. It is 

 here, and perhaps here only, that a very full political exposition of that 

 struggle may yet be collected. It makes a memorable history, second 

 only to that of the war for independence. The most valuable feature 

 of it is its freedom from personal or party motive. Mr. Quiucy never 

 sought an office or peddled for a place. In a word, he was thoroughly 

 independent, a quality more often praised than practised among men 

 of his class, when they undertake to meddle with politics at all. 



Neither was it only in the field of controversy that he exercised 

 his pen. It was early in his career that he ventured upon a work of 

 fancy. This was a small volume issued under the name of " Wensley, 

 A Tale ; " and the scene of action purported to be laid in New England 

 somewhere about the middle of the last century. It aimed to repre- 

 sent neither the more polished nor the purely homely phases of life, 

 all which had been shown well enough already elsewhere, but rather 

 the quiet and measured retirement of the middling but educated class 

 settled in districts rather remote from the populous seaboard, and yet 

 not wholly out of reach. The story is simply developed through the 

 agency of four or five characters of both sexes, and the happy union 

 of the hero and heroine in spite of the wicked contrivances of an 

 English rival to defeat it. As an experiment, it was certainly not 

 without interest. Its greatest recommendation consists in its easy 

 vein of humor, of a sort much removed from that which under the 

 name of Yankee has been carried too near the extreme of vulgarity of 

 late years. The characters may not appear to excite much sympathy 

 under their trials, but at least they are well sketched, and the dialogue 

 retains salt enough everywhere to hold the attention and leave at the 

 end good-will. 



This book of " "Wensley " and another of the same sort, which he 

 prepared for a magazine, but did not publish, formed the recreation of 

 Mr. Quincy. His more elaborate work is to be found in the continu- 

 ous history, furnished by him to the anti-slavery presses, of the fearful 

 political struggle for the extermination of slavery, in which he took 



