Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 6
1835-01-03
Cold day. I went to the office as usual and was occupied in Accounts. Closed the business of the Suffolk Insurance Shares and wrote my Diary. This done I took a walk and stopped in to see Greenough’s Statues. Very pretty—The only piece of his sculpture that I have felt any wish to possess. Yet I prefer the greater specimens of skill which are developed in more adult figures. I should like very well a bas relief. Home where I read Ovid. Began the last book of the Metamorphoses, which has been a very amusing study to me.
Afternoon, Papers of James Lovell. A man whose situation gave his letters unusual interest. Yet he is so crackbrained that his prose is hardly intelligible and his cypher utterly unreadable.1 This is a great pity. Such half disclosures of the course of things are worse than none at all. Evening quietly at home. I read d’Israeli and the charming poetry of Oberon. I go on fast in German.
CFA several times recorded his impatience with James Lovell’s enigmatic style and mystifying cipher, an impatience that John Adams had earlier experienced and expressed. Lovell’s services to both JA and AA as the interpreter and transmitter to them of congressional intelligence during JA’s ministries abroad, 1778–1782, were substantial, however, and there is further evidence that his style was not, as CFA supposed, the expression of a limited mind. See JA, Diary and Autobiography
, 1:288, and the entries under Lovell in the index to vol. 4 of
Adams Family Correspondence
; on his cipher, see the appendix in the same volume.