meets those dangerous English radicals Priestley and Price. And with the warmth of fond native prejudice, we should adore her for writing home:
Do you know that European birds have not half the melody of ours? Nor is their fruit half so sweet, nor their flowers half so fragrant, nor their manners half so pure, nor their people half so virtuous; but keep this to yourself, or I shall be thought more than half deficient in understanding and taste.
In the jargon of Brooks and Henry Adams, as I have remarked, irresistible "lines of force" converge for the education of the second generation. More humanly speaking, the ambition of John, the tenderness and pride of Abigail, unite above the cradle of John Quincy, and most intelligently conspire to give him what he later was to recognize as "an unparalleled education." "It should be your care and mine," John writes to his wife, "to elevate the minds of our children, and exalt their courage, to accelerate and animate their industry and activity." It is the fashion nowadays to assert, against the evidence of history, that great men in their critical hours are unconscious of their greatness; but these Adamses assuredly knew what they were about. With the fullest recognition that her boy's father and his friends are living classics, Abigail writes:
