Henry Adams is the third son of Charles Francis Adams, Sr.,—­the able Minister to England during the Civil War,—­and grandson of John Quincy Adams.  He was born in Boston, February 16th, 1838, graduated from Harvard in 1858, and served as private secretary to his father in England.  In 1870 he became editor of the North American Review and Professor of History at Harvard, in which place he won wide repute for originality and power of inspiring enthusiasm for research in his pupils.  He has written several essays and books on historical subjects, and edited others,—­’Essays on Anglo-Saxon Law’ (1876), ’Documents Relating to New England Federalism’ (1877), ‘Albert Gallatin’ (1879), ‘Writings of Albert Gallatin’ (1879), ‘John Randolph’ (1882) in the ‘American Statesmen’ Series, and ‘Historical Essays’; but his great life-work and monument is his ‘History of the United States, 1801-17’ (the Jefferson and Madison administrations), to write which he left his professorship in 1877, and after passing many years in London, in other foreign capitals, in Washington, and elsewhere, studying archives, family papers, published works, shipyards, and many other things, in preparation for it, published the first volume in 1889, and the last in 1891.  It is in nine volumes, of which the introductory chapters and the index make up one.

The work in its inception (though not in its execution) is a polemic tract—­a family vindication, an act of pious duty; its sub-title might be, ’A Justification of John Quincy Adams for Breaking with the Federalist Party.’  So taken, the reader who loves historical fights and seriously desires truth should read the chapters on the Hartford Convention and its preliminaries side by side with the corresponding pages in Henry Cabot Lodge’s ‘Life of George Cabot.’  If he cannot judge from the pleadings of these two able advocates with briefs for different sides, it is not for lack of full exposition.

But the ‘History’ is far more and higher than a piece of special pleading.  It is in the main, both as to domestic and international matters, a resolutely cool and impartial presentation of facts and judgments on all sides of a period where passionate partisanship lies almost in the very essence of the questions—­a tone contrasting oddly with the political action and feeling of the two Presidents.  Even where, as toward the New England Federalists, many readers will consider him unfair in his deductions, he never tampers with or unfairly proportions the facts.

The work is a model of patient study, not alone of what is conventionally accepted as historic material, but of all subsidiary matter necessary to expert discussion of the problems involved.  He goes deeply into economic and social facts; he has instructed himself in military science like a West Point student, in army needs like a quartermaster, in naval construction, equipment, and management like a naval officer.  Of purely literary qualities, the history presents