Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 8
1839-06-13
Clouds and rain. At home, rather idle. Evening at home.
Looked over the review of Tucker which I have finished and found it on the whole as good as I had any reason to expect. I will send it and take leave of Mr. Hunt for the present who has not as yet made out to publish his first number. Perhaps he will fail in doing so at all. At any rate this makes the last of my positive occupation and in the absence of new I rather idled.
249Looked over some of the MS of J.A. at the house and had some conversation with my father about them, who recommended to me to attempt a biography of my grandmother.1 I do not know that this would be beyond my ability.
Read more of Lessing’s Fables and after dinner Lucan 7. 306–616. Also Grimm, but I felt languid all day as from indigestion. Sorry to find these symptoms coming back upon me. My father spent an hour with us in the evening so that as it rained from the North East I concluded not to go down.
On the day before, JQA had been visited by Henry Colman, commissioner of agriculture and former active minister (see entry for 12 March 1837, above) whom he had encountered at the dinner of the Agricultural Society on 8 June. Colman sought from JQA sanction to write a memoir of the life of AA, “whom he said he had almost adored; a proposal which I promised to take into consideration. Mr. Colman is a highly respectable worthy and intelligent man; but the task of writing a memoir of the life of my mother ought to be performed by myself or by my Son” (JQA, Diary, 12 June).