political opportunity. A revolution had taken place which had made him appear "an estray of the fifties, a belated reveller, a scholar-gipsy." Coal, iron, and steam had supplanted agriculture, handwork, and learning. "His world was dead. Not a Polish Jew fresh from Warsaw or Cracow—not a furtive Yaccob or Ysaac—but had a keener instinct, an intenser energy and a freer hand than he—American of Americans, with Heaven knew how many Puritans and Patriots behind him, and an education that had cost a civil war." And so Henry drifted into his antiquarian professorship at Harvard, cut loose from that and wrote his great history of Jefferson and Madison, and only returned to Washington to watch the spectacle, and to sit in his windows with John Hay, laughing at Presidents, and mocking the runner's heat.
Where was the bold energy of the first and second Adams that broke down barred doors of opportunity and found a "charm" in contending against a powerful opposition? Transmuted by the accumulated culture of the Adams family education—not wasted. The mockery and the pervasive irony, so seductive in The Education, spring from no sense of essentially depleted energy in the author; on the contrary, they have their origin in a really exuberant sense of spiritual superiority. Adams after Adams has seen himself outshone, in the popular estimate, by vulgar "democratical" men,
