Samuel Quincy wrote only one published poem and a diary. The poem, an elegy for his older brother, departs markedly from the Puritan elegiac form, and his diary, written in London in late 1776 and early 1777, during the outbreak of armed resistance in the Colonies, presents an intelligent, discerning, and delightful commentary on the state of the arts in London. The facts that, while he was an undergraduate at Harvard, Quincy was once publicly admonished for having gotten a black slave drunk and that his second wife attributed the aged Quincy's gout to too much dancing testify to this man's determination to enjoy life to the fullest.

Samuel Quincy was born to Josiah and Hannah Sturgis Quincy in Braintree (now known as Quincy), Massachusetts, on 13 April 1734, the second son, among three boys and one girl, Hannah. His older brother, Edmund, took over his father's Boston business in commerce and...