Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 4
1832-10-11
Clouds and occasional heavy rain. I remained quietly at home occupied in reading Lingard and comparing with Hume, and in correcting Text with my father. Few men have left closer pictures of their mind in youth, than my grandfather. And to all it is a study of some interest. We came today to the place where a transition of eleven momentous years to him occurred, and where you jump from his hopes and prospects, his wishes and his discouragements, to the hour of his success and establishment in the world. Is it not a lesson. He was six and twenty in the first instance.1
Afternoon, lost my time in looking over an Account of the trial of two Mr. Sheares for Treason in Ireland in 1798.2 Cruel enough. Evening with the family. Read Dr. Granville who is a little too minute to be interesting. Lingard and Idlers afterwards.
In a small stitched booklet in which JA recorded his early reading and studies and in which he made some journal entries (D/JA/4 in the Adams Papers) there is a gap of eleven years between the entry for 20 Nov. 1761 and the next entry, that for 21 Nov. 1772. In the latter entry JA philosophized on the changes that had occurred during the interval (JA, Diary and Autobiography
, 1:224; 2:67–68). CFA’s words here should probably not be understood to mean that at this time he and JQA had not yet come upon some or all of JA’s 377journal entries, somewhat irregularly made, during the intervening period in one or another of the booklets he used for his diary (same, 1:226, 235, 252, et seq.).
Report of the Trial for High Treason of Henry and John Sheares, Dublin, 1798.