still to come.  If, as is sometimes alleged in such cases, they gain in literary finish at the expense of force, it is not to be forgotten that the forcible speech which, ignoring all rules, carries its point by assault, may buy immediate effect at the expense of permanent respectability.  And if John Quincy Adams, who labored as Cicero did to give his addresses the greatest possible literary finish, does not rank with Cicero among orators, it is certain that respectability will always be willingly conceded him by every generation of his countrymen.

Some idea of the extent of his early studies may be gained from his father’s letter to Benjamin Waterhouse, written from Auteuil, France, in 1785.  John Quincy Adams being then only in his eighteenth year, the elder Adams said of him:—­

“If you were to examine him in English and French poetry, I know not where you would find anybody his superior; in Roman and English history few persons of his age.  It is rare to find a youth possessed of such knowledge.  He has translated Virgil’s ‘Aeneid,’ ‘Suetonius,’ the whole of ‘Sallust’; ‘Tacitus,’ ‘Agricola’; his ‘Germany’ and several other books of his ‘Annals,’ a great part of Horace, some of Ovid, and some of Caesar’s ‘Commentaries,’ in writing, besides a number of Tully’s orations. ...  In Greek his progress has not been equal, yet he has studied morsels in Aristotle’s ‘Poetics,’ in Plutarch’s ‘Lives,’ and Lucian’s ‘Dialogues,’ ’The Choice of Hercules,’ in Xenophon, and lately he has gone through several books of Homer’s ‘Iliad.’”

The elder Adams concludes the list of his son’s accomplishments with a catalogue of his labors in mathematics hardly inferior in length to that cited in the classics.  Even if it were true, as has been urged by the political opponents of the Adams family, that no one of its members has ever shown more than respectable natural talent, it would add overwhelming weight to the argument in favor of the laborious habits of study which have characterized them to the third and fourth generations, and, from the time of John Adams until our own, have made them men of mark and far-reaching national influence.

In national politics, John Quincy Adams, the last of the line of colonial gentlemen who achieved the presidency, stood for education, for rigid ideas of moral duty, for dignity, for patriotism, for all the virtues which are best cultivated through processes of segregation.  He ended an epoch in which it was possible for a man who, as he did, wrote ‘Poems on Religion and Society’ and paraphrased the Psalms into English verse to be elected President.  It has hardly been possible since his day.

Chosen as a Democrat in 1825, Mr. Adams was really the first Whig President.  His speeches are important, historically, because they define political tendencies as a result of which the Whig party took the place of the Federalist.

ORATION AT PLYMOUTH