knowledge, all inherited
and all present influences combined to make him, as it may be put (p. 008)
in a single word, sensible. He had inevitably a mental boyhood and
youth, but morally he was never either a child or a lad; all his
leading traits of character were as strongly marked when he was seven
as when he was seventy, and at an age when most young people simply
win love or cause annoyance, he was preferring wisdom to mischief, and
actually in his earliest years was attracting a certain respect.

These few but bold and striking touches which paint the boy are
changed for an infinitely more elaborate and complex presentation from
the time when the Diary begins. Even as abridged in the printing, this
immense work ranks among the half-dozen longest diaries to be found in
any library, and it is unquestionably by far the most valuable.
Henceforth we are to travel along its broad route to the end; we shall
see in it both the great and the small among public men halting onward
in a way very different from that in which they march along the
stately pages of the historian, and we shall find many side-lights, by
no means colorless, thrown upon the persons and events of the
procession. The persistence, fulness, and faithfulness with which it
was kept throughout so busy a life are marvellous, but are also highly
characteristic of the most persevering and industrious of men. (p. 009)
That it has been preserved is cause not only for thankfulness but
for some surprise also. For if its contents had been known, it is
certain that all the public men of nearly two generations who figure
in it would have combined into one vast and irresistible conspiracy to
obtain and destroy it. There was always a superfluity of gall in the
diarist's ink. Sooner or later every man of any note in the United
States was mentioned in his pages, and there is scarcely one of them,
who, if he could have read what was said of him, would not have
preferred the ignominy of omission. As one turns the leaves he feels
as though he were walking through a graveyard of slaughtered
reputations wherein not many headstones show a few words of measured
commendation. It is only the greatness and goodness of Mr. Adams
himself which relieve the universal atmosphere of sadness far more
depressing than the melancholy which pervades the novels of George
Eliot. The reader who wishes to retain any comfortable degree of
belief in his fellow men will turn to the wall all the