have treasured up, whose virtues live in my remembrance; happy if I cou'd say, they have been transplanted into my life."

But, though her early years were spent in a spot of so great seclusion as her grandfather's house must then have been, it does not appear that she remained wholly unacquainted with young persons of her own sex and age. She had relations and connexions, both on the father's and the mother's side; and with these she was upon as intimate terms as circumstances would allow. The distance between the homes of the young people was, however, too great, and the means of their parents too narrow, to admit of very frequent personal intercourse; the substitute for which was a rapid interchange of written communications. The letter-writing propensity manifested itself early in this youthful circle. A considerable number of the epistles of her correspondents have been preserved among the papers of Mrs. Adams. They are deserving of notice only as they furnish a general idea of the tastes and pursuits of the young women of that day. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about them is the evident influence upon the writers, which the study of "The Spectator," and of the poets, appears to have had. This is perceptible in the more important train of thought and structure of lan

guage, as well as in the lesser trifles of the taste for quotation and for fictitious signatures. Calliope and Myra, Arpasia and Aurelia, have effectually succeeded in disguising their true names from the eyes of younger generations. The signature of Miss Smith appears to have been Diana, a name which she dropped after her marriage, without losing the fancy that prompted to its selection. Her letters, during the Revolution, show clearly enough the tendency of her own thoughts and feelings in the substitute, she then adopted, of Portia. Her fondness for quotations, the fashion of that day, it will be seen, was maintained through life.

Perhaps there is no species of exercise, in early life, more productive of results useful to the mind, than that of writing letters. Over and above the mechanical facility of constructing sentences, which no teaching will afford so well, the interest with which the object is commonly pursued, gives an extraordinary impulse to the intellect. This is promoted, in a degree proportionate to the scarcity of temporary and local subjects for discussion. Where there is little gossip, the want of it must be supplied from books. The flowers of literature spring up where the weeds of scandal take no root. The young ladies of Massachusetts, in the last century, were certainly readers, even though

only self-taught; and their taste was not for the feeble and nerveless sentiment, or the frantic passion, which comes from the novels and romances in the circulating library of our day, but was derived from the deepest wells of English literature. The poets and moralists of the mother country furnished to these inquiring minds their ample stores, and they were used to an extent, which it is at least doubtful if the more pretending and elaborate instruction of the present generation would equal.

Of Mrs. Adams's letters during this period of her youth, but very few remain in possession of her descendants. One specimen has been accidentally obtained, which makes the first in the present publication. The writer was, at the date of the letter, not quite seventeen, and was addressing a lady some years older than herself. This may account for a strain of gravity rather beyond her years or ordinary disposition. Two other letters, written to Mr. Adams, after she was betrothed, and before she was married to him, have been added, because they are believed to be more indicative of her usual temper at that age. These have been admitted to a place in the selection, not so much as claiming a particular merit, as because they are thought to furnish a standard of her mind, and general character, when a girl, by which the improve

ment and full developement of her powers as a woman may readily be measured.

The father of Mrs. Adams was a pious man, with something of that vein of humor, not uncommon among the clergy of New England, which ordinarily found such a field for exercise as is displayed in the pages of Cotton Mather. He was the father of three daughters, all of them women of uncommon force of intellect, though the fortunes of two of them confined its influence to a sphere much more limited than that which fell to the lot of Mrs. Adams. Mary, the eldest, was married, in 1762, to Richard Cranch, an English emigrant, who had settled at Germantown, a part of Braintree, and who subsequently became a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas in Massachusetts, and died, highly respected, in the early part of the present century. The present William Cranch, of Washington, who has presided so long, and with so much dignity and fidelity, over the Circuit Court of the District of Columbia, is the son of this marriage. Elizabeth, the youngest, was twice married; first, to the Reverend John Shaw, minister of Haverhill, in Massachusetts, and, after his death, to the Reverend Mr. Peabody, of Atkinson, New Hampshire. Thus much is necessary to be stated, in order to explain the relations, which the parties, in many

of the letters, bore to each other. It is an anecdote, told of Mr. Smith, that, upon the marriage of his eldest daughter, he preached to his people from the text in the forty-second verse of the tenth chapter of Luke, " And Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her." Two years elapsed, and his second daughter, the subject of this notice, was about to marry John Adams, then a lawyer in good practice, when some disapprobation of the match appears to have manifested itself among a portion of his parishioners. The profession of law was, for a long period in the colonial history of Massachusetts, unknown; and, after circumstances called it forth, the prejudices of the inhabitants, who thought it a calling hardly honest, were arrayed against those who adopted it. There are many still living, who can remember how strong they remained, even down to the time of the adoption of the present Federal Constitution; and the records of the General Court, at its very last session, of 1840, will show, that they have not quite disappeared at this day. Besides this, the family of Mr. Adams, the son of a small farmer of the middle class in Braintree, was thought scarcely good enough to match with the minister's daughter, descended from so many of the shining lights of the colony. It is probable, that Mr. Smith was