last, at his home in Lebanon, August 17, 1785. bill, announcing the surrender of Cornwallis. "Praised be the Lord of Hosts!" is his addition to the glowing The personal qualities of Trumbull items of intelligence. The war is now were rarely adapted to serve the cause over, and the venerable patriarch, now in which his life was passed. The past three score and ten, determines participant in three great wars, the to lay aside the dignity and public experience of Nestor was added to care which had been imposed upon a natural prudence and moderation him the greater part of his life-he which were seldom at fault. His simhad been fifty-one years the servant of plicity of character was the secret of the public-and to make the occasion its greatness. He early fixed the prin memorable, delivered a farewell ad- ciples of his life, and steadily adhered dress to the House of Representatives, to them to the end. So honors came a parting legacy to his countrymen, to him, and were heaped upon him— the last of the series of State papers the steady, persistent, useful, devout and proclamations bearing the name citizen of Lebanon. There was his of the Governor, the man whom his home, there was his armor, and he State delighted to honor. The address, appears seldom to have travelled much worthy to be read by the side of the beyond its rural precinct; but his influsimilar paper of Washington, breathes ence knew no bounds, it was seen and an exalted piety and patriotism. Its felt in every vein of the public life, in lessons are fraught with experience and the court, in the camp-we may almost enlightened statesmanship. say in the pulpit, for divinity never After his retirement, in the year and entirely lost, amidst the cares of busi a half which was left to him of life, ness and of state, her early pupil. ConTrumbull was partly engaged in public necticut may well honor his memory, business, but more in the study of and in times of doubt and peril, think divinity and the preparation for the how her Revolutionary governor, Trumfinal scene. He wisely interposed an bull, would have thought and acted. interval of comparative leisure between If it be true that the origin of the his public career and the grave. The term, "Brother Jonathan," familiarly Bible was more than ever his com- applied to the nation, originated, as is panion, and its grand teachings were sometimes said, with an expression of enhanced to him by reading them General Washington, in an emergency in the original Greek and Hebrew. of the public service: "We must conDeath came to him in the midst of sult Brother Jonathan on the subject," these peaceful occupations, from an act we may find a happy memorial of his of charity. A fever, caught in a visit fame in a phrase which bids fair to be to a dying man, took violent hold of more lasting than many a monument him, and in a few days he breathed his of stone or marble. JOHN ADAMS. In the notice on a previous page of and of the Episcopal reader at Brainthe genealogy of the Adams Family, tree, was a good student of his class, in the sketch of Samuel Adams, we which sent many eminent men into the have seen the point of separation of the world, and in due time graduated at Braintree and Boston branches in the the age of twenty in 1755. The talent third generation midway between the which he displayed in the commenceAmerican founder and his distin- ment exercises, attracted the notice of a guished descendants of the Revolution- person present, charged with a commis ary era. John Adams, the grandfather sion to supply a Latin master for the of Samuel, removed to Boston; his Grammar School of Worcester. He brother, Joseph, remained at Braintree, I applied to Adams, who undertook the becoming the parent of a son, John, task, and shortly after set out on the who was the father of the future Presi- horse sent for him by the town's people, dent. making the sixty miles' journey in a single day. This transfer from the home sphere was highly favorable to his development: he was thrown upon his own resources among strangers, and doubtless the privations and little vexations of his schoolmaster's life, stimulated his independent nature to further exertions. John Adams, the subject of this paper, was born in the town of Braintree, October 19, 1735. His father was something more than a respectable, he was a useful citizen of the town; he had been educated at Harvard; held the offices of deacon and selectman, honoring the one by his piety and discharging the other with The school appears at first to have fidelity, and according to a habit not been very distasteful to his aspiring unfrequent with small property-holders mind; but he became reconciled to its in New England, eked out the re- duties, and doubtless profited by the sources of his farm by shoe-making. discipline which he himself adminis Taking care to transmit the benefit tered. "I find," says he, after some which he had received, he provided months' occupation at this drudgery in that his eldest son, John, should have shaping the crude material of the Wor the advantage of a college education. cester nurseries, "I find by repeated He was prepared for Harvard by the observation and experiment in my aid both of the Congregational minister school, that human nature is more ing, and one day in October, 1758, goes to Boston to be introduced by easily wrought upon and governed by promises and encouragement and praise, than by punishment and threatening Attorney-General Gridley, the father and blame"-a sentence which should be grafted in the memory of every schoolmaster in the land. The pedagogue is not altogether given over to mending pens, the agreeable alternations of birching and ferul ing or a-b-c-ing the boys, of which he humorously complains, but finds time to store his mind with good reading, makes acquaintance with the writings of such political philosophers as Gordon and Bolingbroke, and is ambitious of the society of the place, always conscious that John Adams should be somebody in the world, and that it is but an act of common justice to himself to take all proper means to secure the position. The house of Colonel James Putnam, an able lawyer of the place, is open to him; thither he frequently resorts, and after awhile, the law securing his attention-he had by this time pretty well argued himself out of the New England orthodoxy, and so given up any thoughts of the pulpit-proposes to study the profession with his friend. Mr. Putnam consents, and Mrs. Putnam makes provision in the house for the student, who is also to continue in charge of the urchins at the school. The legal apprenticeship continues two years, during which it is to be regretted that the Diary is silent, when John Adams takes leave of the population of Worcester, little and great, to seek admission to the Colonial bar. He takes up his residence with his father at Braintree, or Quincy, as it is now called, at the old paternal dwell of the bar, to the Superior Court, and is admitted Attorney at Law in his Majesty's Courts of the Province. The attorney relaxes none of his dili gence in attention to the old law, in the study of laborious volumes, over which the dust has long gathered in legal libraries. Those were the days before Blackstone, when no republican road had been marked out to the secret places of the profession, when the maxim of Coke, the viginti annorum lucubrationes, was still in vogue, when no Lord Brougham or reviser of the statutes had risen to prepare the smooth pathway of legal reform. Reading the entries of these grave old studies, burdened with the traditions of English centuries, from Bracton and Fleta, Coke and Fortescue, we may ask, "Where be his quiddets now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?" Gone with the old wigs and colonial state, and we need sigh no alas! at the reminiscence. We see Adams, in these years of opening manhood, lighted along his daily path by the cheerful, pleasant Diary, the man of the world and of society, emerging from the old formalism; the independent thinker, built on the antiquarian student, as he gathers strength from discussion, and takes the measure of the leaders of that day. He is not backward in entering into controversy with, and judging some of them, but he retires at night to be a more rigid censor of himself. There is a sufficient stock of vanity in some of |