100 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



at that day in its stately swans and half-shy, half-familiar 

 deer) with John Adams, who tells us that Dr. Priestley 

 looked on the French monarchy as the tenth horn of the 

 Beast in Revelation, a horn that has set more sober 

 wits dancing than that of Huon of Bordeaux. Those 

 were days, we are inclined to think, of more solid and 

 elegant hospitality than our own, the elegance of 

 manners, at once more courtly and more frugal, of men 

 who had better uses for wealth than merely to display it. 

 Dinners have more courses now, and, like the Gascon in 

 the old story, who could not see the town for the houses, 

 we miss the real dinner in the multiplicity of its details. 

 We might seek long before we found so good cheer, so 

 good company, or so good talk as our fathers had at 

 Lieutenant-Governor Winthrop's or Senator Cabot's. 



We shall not do Mr. Edmund Quincy the wrong of 

 picking out in advance all the plums in his volume, 

 leaving to the reader only the less savory mixture that 

 held them together, a kind of filling unavoidable in 

 books of this kind, and too apt to be what boys at 

 boarding-school call stick-jaw, but of which there is no 

 more than could not be helped here, and that light and 

 palatable. But here and there is a passage where we 

 cannot refrain, for there is a smack of Jack Horner in all 

 of us, and a reviewer were nothing without it. Josiah 

 Quincy was born in 1772. His father, returning from a 

 mission to England, died in sight of the dear New Eng 

 land shore three years later. His young widow was 

 worthy of him, and of the son whose character she was 

 to have so large a share in forming. There is some 

 thing very touching and beautiful in this little picture 

 of her which Mr. Quincy drew in his extreme old age. 



" My mother imbibed, as was usual with the women 

 of the period, the spirit of the times. Patriotism was 

 not then a profession, but an energetic principle beating 



