"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,[1] but rising to the call when the roar of cannon is in her ears,[2] or when she reproves her husband for not knowing her better than to think her a coward, and to fear telling her bad news,[3] 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."[4]
It was the fortune of the Editor to know the subject of his Memoir only during the last year of her life, and when he was too young fully to comprehend the beauty of her character; but it will be a source of unceasing gratification to him, as long as he may live, that he has been permitted to pay this tribute, however inadequate, to her memory.
