the
reminiscence affected his spirits cruelly.

In August, 1840, he writes that he has been twelve years submitting in
silence to the "foulest and basest aspersions," to which it would have
been waste of time to make reply, since the public ear had not been
open to him. "Is the time arriving," he asks, "for me to speak? or
must I go down to the grave and leave posterity to do justice to my
father and to me?"

He has had at least the advantage of saying his say to posterity in a
very effective and convincing shape in that Diary, which so discomfited
and enraged General Jackson. There is plain enough speaking in its
pages, which were a safety valve whereby much wrath escaped. Mr. Adams
had the faculty of forcible expression when he chose to employ it, as
may be seen from a few specimen sentences. On March 28, 1840, he
remarks that Atherton "this day emitted half an hour of his rotten
breath against" a pending bill. Atherton was infamous as the mover of
the "gag" resolution, and Mr. Adams abhorred him accordingly. (p. 299)
Duncan, of Cincinnati, mentioned as "delivering a dose of balderdash,"
is described as "the prime bully of the Kinderhook Democracy," without
"perception of any moral distinction between truth and falsehood, ...
a thorough-going hack-demagogue, coarse, vulgar, and impudent, with a
vein of low humor exactly suited to the rabble of a popular city and
equally so to the taste of the present House of Representatives."
Other similar bits of that pessimism and belief in the deterioration
of the times, so common in old men, occasionally appear. In August,
1835, he thinks that "the signs of the times are portentous. All the
tendencies of legislation are to the removal of restrictions from the
vicious and the guilty, and to the exercise of all the powers of
government, legislative, judicial, and executive, by lawless
assemblages of individuals." December 27, 1838, he looks upon the
Senate and the House, "the cream of the land, the culled darlings of
fifteen millions," and observes that "the remarkable phenomenon that
they present is the level of intellect and of morals upon which they
stand; and this universal mediocrity is the basis upon which the
liberties of this nation repose." In July, 1840, he thinks that

"parties are falling into profligate factions. I have seen this
before; but the worst symptom now is the change in the (p. 300)
manners of the people. The continuance of the