"Quincy, 24 January, 1818.
"My dear sir,--When President Monroe was in Boston, upon his late tour,
encompassed by citizens, surrounded by the military, harassed by
invitations to parties and applications innumerable for office, some
gentleman asked him if he was not completely worn out? To which he
replied, 'Oh no. A little flattery will support a man through great
fatigue.' I may apply the observation to myself, and say that the
flattery in your letter leads me to break through the aversion, which is
daily increasing upon me, to writing.
"You terrify me, my dear sir, when you ask for letters of mine to
publish. It is true that Dr. Disney, to whom the late Mr. Hollis
bequeathed his property, found amongst his papers some letters from the
President and from me, which he asked permission to publish. We had both
forgotten the contents of them, but left them to his judgment to do with
them as he pleased, and accordingly he published some of them. One other
letter to my son, when he first went to France in the year 1778, by some
means or other was published in an English magazine; and those, I
believe, are all the mighty works of mine which ever have, or will, by
my consent, appear before the public. _Style_ I never studied. My
language is
"'Warm from the _heart_ and faithful to its fires,'
the spontaneous effusions of friendship. As such I tender them to Mr.
Vanderkemp, sure of his indulgence, since I make no pretensions to the
character which he professes to fear, that of a learned lady."
* * * * *
These observations are strictly true. To learning, in the ordinary sense
of that term, Mrs. Adams could make no claim. Her reading had been
extensive in the lighter departments of literature, and she was well
acquainted with the poets in her own language; but it went no further.
It is the soul, shining through the words, that gives to them their
great attraction; the spirit, ever equal to the occasion, whether a
great or a small one,--a spirit inquisitive and earnest in the little
details of life, as when she was in France and England, playful when she
describes daily duties,[11] but rising to the call when the roar of
cannon is in her ears,[12] or when she reproves her husband for not
knowing her better than to think her a coward, and to fear telling her
bad news,[13] or when she warns her son that she "would rather he had
found his grave in the ocean, or that any untimely death should crop him
in his infant years, than see him an immoral, profligate, or graceless
child."[14]
It was the fortune of the Editor to know the subject of his Memoir only
during the last year of her life, and when he was too young fully to
comprehend the beauty of her character; but it will be a source of
unceasing gratification to him, as long as he may live, that he has been
permitted to pay this tribute, however inadequate, to her memory.