A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 87 



Mr. Edmund Quincy has told the story of his father s life 

 with the skill and good taste that might have been expected 

 from the author of &quot; Wensley.&quot; Considering natural 

 partialities, he has shown a discretion of which we are 

 oftener reminded by missing than by meeting it. He has 

 given extracts enough from speeches to show their bearing 

 and quality from letters, to recall bygone modes of thought 

 and indicate rnany-sided friendly relations with good and 

 eminent men ; above all, he has lost no opportunity to 

 illustrate that life of the past, near in date, yet alien in 

 manners, whose current glides so imperceptibly from one 

 generation into another that we fail to mark the shif tings 

 of its bed or the change in its nature wrought by the 

 affluents that discharge into it on all sides here a stream 

 bred in the hills to sweeten, there the sewerage of some 

 great city to corrupt. We cannot but lament that Mr. 

 Quincy did not earlier begin to keep a diary. &quot; Miss not 

 the discourses of the elders,&quot; though put now in the 

 Apocrypha, is a wise precept, but incomplete unless we add, 

 &quot; Nor cease from recording whatsoever thing thou hast 

 gathered therefrom &quot; so ready is Oblivion with her fatal 

 shears. The somewhat greasy heap of a literary rag-and- 

 bone-picker, like Atheneeus, is turned to gold by time. 

 Even the Virgilium vidi tantum of Dryden about Milton, 

 and of Pope again about Dryden, is worth having, and 

 gives a pleasant fillip to the fancy. There is much of this 

 quality in Mr. Edmund Quincy s book, enough to make us 

 wish there were more. We get a glimpse of President 

 Washington, in 1795, who reminded Mr. Quincy &quot; of the 

 gentlemen who used to come to Boston in those days to 

 attend the General Court from Hampden or Franklin 

 County, in the western part of the western State. A little 

 stiff in his person, not a little formal in his manners, not 

 particularly at ease in the presence of strangers. He had 

 the air of a country gentleman not accustomed to mix much 

 in society, perfectly polite, but not easy in his address and 

 conversation, and not graceful in his gait and movements.&quot; 

 Our figures of Washington have been so long equestrian, 



