A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. Ill 



number of duties to perform, always do the most dis- 

 agreeable one first." No advice could have beeu more 

 in character, and it is perhaps better than the great 

 German's, "Do the duty that lies nearest thee." 



Perhaps the most beautiful part of Mr. Quincy's life 

 was his old age. What in most men is decay, was 

 in him but beneficent prolongation and adjournment. 

 His interest in aff"airs unabated, his judgment undimmed, 

 his fire unchilled, his last years were indeed "lovely as 

 a Lapland night." Till within a year or two of its fall, 

 there were no signs of dilapidation in that stately edifice. 

 Singularly felicitous w^as Mr. Winthrop's application to 

 him of Wordsworth's verses : — 



" The monumental pomp of age 

 Was in that goodly personage.'' 



Everything that Macbeth foreboded the want of, he had 

 in deserved abundance, — the love, the honor, the obe^ 

 dience, the troops of friends. His equanimity w^as beau- 

 tiful. He loved life, as men of large vitality always do, 

 but he did not fear to lose life by changing the scene of 

 it. Visiting him in his ninetieth year with a fi-iend, he 

 said to us, among other things : "I have no desire to 

 die, but also no reluctance. Indeed, I have a considera- 

 ble curiosity about the other world, I have never been 

 to Europe, you know^" Even in his extreme senescence 

 there w^as an April mood somewhere in his nature "that 

 put a spirit of youth in everything." He seemed to feel 

 that he could draw^ against an unlimited credit of years. 

 When eighty-tw^o, he said smilingly to a young man just 

 returned from a foreign tour, " Well, w^ell, I mean to go 

 myself when I am old enough to profit by it." We have 

 seen many old men whose lives were mere waste and 

 desolation, who made longevity disreputable by their 

 untimely persistence in it ; but in Mr. Quincy's length 

 of years there w^as nothing that was not venerable. To 



