present, during a period daily becoming more interesting as it recedes from us, and in the high moral and religious tone which uniformly pervades them. They are here given to the public exactly as they were written, with only those corrections or omissions which were absolutely necessary either to perfect the sense or to avoid subjects exclusively personal. It was the habit of the writer to make first a rough draft of what she intended to say, and from this to form a fair copy for her correspondent; but in the process she altered so much of the original that, in every instance where the two have been compared, they are by no means the same thing. Only in one or two cases, and for particular reasons, has the loss of the real letter been supplied by the first draft. The principal difference between them ordinarily is that the former is much the most full. Frequently, it will be seen that she did not copy, the task being, as she testifies in the postscript, extremely irksome to her.

The value attached to her letters by some of her correspondents, even during her lifetime, was so considerable that it produced from one of them, the late Judge Vanderkemp, of New York, a request that a collection should then be made for publication. In allusion to this, Mrs. Adams writes in a note to a female friend,—

"The President has a letter from Vanderkemp, in which he proposes to have him send a collection of my letters to publish! A pretty figure I should make. No. No. I have not any ambition to appear in print. Heedless and inaccurate as I am, I have too much vanity to risk my reputation before the public."

And on the same day she replies to Judge Vanderkemp as follows:—

"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]