mark the shiftings 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. "Miss not the
discourses of the elders," though put now in the Apocrypha, is a wise
precept, but incomplete unless we add, "Nor cease from recording
whatsoever thing thou hast gathered therefrom,"--so ready is Oblivion
with her fatal shears. The somewhat greasy heap of a literary
rag-and-bone-picker, like Athenaeus, is turned to gold by time. Even the
_Virgilium vide 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 "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 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." Our figures
of Washington have been so long equestrian, that it is pleasant to meet
him dismounted for once. In the same way we get a card of invitation to
a dinner of sixty covers at John Hancock's, and see the rather
light-weighted great man wheeled round the room (for he had adopted
Lord Chatham's convenient trick of the gout) to converse with his
guests. In another place we are presented, with Mr. Merry, the English
Minister, to Jefferson, whom we find in an unofficial costume of studied
slovenliness, intended as a snub to haughty Albion. Slippers down at the
heel and a dirty shirt become weapons of diplomacy and threaten more
serious war. Thus many a door into the past, long irrevocably shut upon
us, is set ajar, and we of the younger generation on the landing catch
peeps of distinguished men, and bits of their table-talk. We drive in
from Mr. Lyman's beautiful seat at Waltham (unique 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 monar