8O A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



be thankful that in every man s life there is a holiday of 

 romance, an illumination of the senses by the soul, that 

 makes him a poet while it lasts. Mr. Quincy caught the 

 enchantment through his ears, a song of Burns heard from 

 the next room conveying the infection a fact still inexpli 

 cable to him after lifelong meditation thereon, as he was not 

 very impressible by music! To us there is something very 

 characteristic in this rapid energy of Mr. Quincy, something 

 very delightful in his naive account of the affair. It needs 

 the magic of no Dr. Heidegger to make these dried roses, 

 that drop from between the leaves of a volume shut for 

 seventy years, bloom again in all their sweetness. Mr. 

 Edmund Quincy tells us that his mother was not handsome ; 

 but those who remember the gracious dignity of her old age 

 will hardly agree with him. She must always have had that 

 highest kind of beauty which grows more beautiful with 

 years, and keeps the eyes young, as if with the partial con 

 nivance of Time. 



We do not propose to follow Mr. Quincy closely through 

 his whole public life, which, beginning with his thirty- second, 

 ended with his seventy-third year. He entered Congress as 

 the representative of a party privately the most respectable, 

 publicly the least sagacious, among all those which under 

 different names have divided the country. The Federalists 

 were the only proper Tories our politics have ever produced, 

 whose conservatism truly represented an idea, and not a 

 mere selfish interest men who honestly distrusted demo 

 cracy, and stood up for experience, or the tradition which 

 they believed for such, against empiricism. During his 

 Congressional career, the Government was little more than 

 an attacht* of the French legation, and the Opposition to 

 which he belonged a helpless revenant from the dead and 

 buried Colonial past. There are some questions whose in 

 terest dies the moment they are settled ; others into which 

 a moral element enters that hinders them from being settled, 

 though they may be decided. It is hard to revive any enthusi 

 asm about &&Embargo t though it once could inspire the boyish 

 muse of Bryant, or in the impressment quarrel, though the 

 Trent difficulty for a time rekindled its old animosities. The 

 stars in their courses fought against Mr. Quincy s party, which 

 was not in sympathy with the instincts of the people, groping 

 about for some principle of nationality, and finding a substi- 



