It is a lure leading into a vast literary edifice, built by successive generations, which one must at least casually explore before one can conceive what was the heritage of Henry Adams, or can guess whether the family's energy suffered degradation when it produced him.
One who wishes to measure the decline from the source must begin with The Works of John Adams in ten volumes, edited by his grandson Charles Francis Adams I, and including a diary so fascinating and so important that one marvels that American students of letters are not occasionally sent to it rather than to Pepys or Evelyn. One should follow this up with the charming letters of John's wife, Abigail, also edited by Charles Francis I, in 1841—a classic which would be in the American Everyman if our publishers fostered American as carefully as they foster English traditions. For John Quincy Adams, we have his own Memoirs in twelve volumes, being portions of that famous diary of which he said: "There has perhaps not been another individual of the human race whose daily existence from early childhood to fourscore years has been noted down with his own hand so minutely as mine;" also a separate volume called Life in a New England Town, being his diary while a student in the office of Theophilus Parsons at Newburyport. One may perhaps pass Charles Francis I with his life by Charles Francis II. Then one descends to the fourth generation, and reads the Autobiography of
