not
where you would find anybody his superior; in Roman and English
history few persons of his age. It is rare to find a youth possessed
of such knowledge. He has translated Virgil's 'Aeneid,' 'Suetonius,'
the whole of 'Sallust'; 'Tacitus,' 'Agricola'; his 'Germany' and
several other books of his 'Annals,' a great part of Horace, some
of Ovid, and some of Caesar's 'Commentaries,' in writing, besides a
number of Tully's orations. ... In Greek his progress has not been
equal, yet he has studied morsels in Aristotle's 'Poetics,' in
Plutarch's 'Lives,' and Lucian's 'Dialogues,' 'The Choice of
Hercules,' in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several
books of Homer's 'Iliad.'"

The elder Adams concludes the list of his son's accomplishments with
a catalogue of his labors in mathematics hardly inferior in length
to that cited in the classics. Even if it were true, as has been
urged by the political opponents of the Adams family, that no one of
its members has ever shown more than respectable natural talent,
it would add overwhelming weight to the argument in favor of the
laborious habits of study which have characterized them to the third
and fourth generations, and, from the time of John Adams until our
own, have made them men of mark and far-reaching national influence.

In national politics, John Quincy Adams, the last of the line of
colonial gentlemen who achieved the presidency, stood for education,
for rigid ideas of moral duty, for dignity, for patriotism, for all
the virtues which are best cultivated through processes of
segregation. He ended an epoch in which it was possible for a man
who, as he did, wrote 'Poems on Religion and Society' and
paraphrased the Psalms into English verse to be elected President.
It has hardly been possible since his day.

Chosen as a Democrat in 1825, Mr. Adams was really the first Whig
President. His speeches are important, historically, because they
define political tendencies as a result of which the Whig party took
the place of the Federalist.

ORATION AT PLYMOUTH

(Delivered at Plymouth on the Twenty-Second Day of December, 1802,
in Commemoration of the Landing of the Pilgrims)

Among the sentiments of most powerful operation upon the human
heart, and most highly honorable to the human character, are those
of veneration for our forefathers, and of love for our posterity.

They form the connecting links between the selfish and the social
passions. By the fundam