ety. At the age of fifty-five he burned his diary, full till then with the expectation that he might accomplish something notable; and in his Autobiography, with the tang of the new Adams humility, he declares: "I now humbly thank fortune that I have almost got through life without making a conspicuous ass of myself."
Brooks Adams also set out as a lawyer, but he seems to have retired much earlier into authorship. His writing is less perspicuous and well-ordered than that of his brother Charles; but that is partly because he has more ideas and more difficult ones. Brooks is a restless-minded lawyer of a not unfamiliar type, who turns here and there for something "craggy" upon which to wreak his excess of mental energy; and so he becomes amateur-historian, amateur-economist, amateur-philosopher. The antiquarianism of historical societies is a bit too tame for his temper. Like his brother Henry, and indeed in collaboration with him, he seeks a law connecting phenomena, and in search of it he ransacks history. He imagines and declares that he has made his mind passive to the lessons of facts and that his results are scientific; but the truth is that he is a dogmatic materialist, an infatuated mechanist, who, when he has formulated an hypothesis, sees nothing between earth and heaven and the first Adam and the last Adams but the proof of it.
Like his grandfather, he finds a certain charm in
