Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 5
1834-04-17
Very warm. I went to the Office. Occupied in various Accounts and lounging in the Insurance Offices reading Newspapers. The accounts are that the Patriotic Bank has stopped payment at Washington making the fourth in the District. The panic there seems to be general. Yesterday Kirk gave me a Note for $50 of the Union Bank of Georgetown which I sent on to be redeemed, today. It was a piece of imprudence in him. The people generally are the sufferers by a state of things like the present, through their ignorance. The better informed can guard against and take advantage of the distress.
Home, dinner. Afternoon, read the History of Maritime discovery and began Ovid with his first heroic epistle Penelope to Ulysses.1 Evening quietly at home. Read part of Belinda, and German—Herder’s sentimental mythology.
A copy of the Heroidum epistolae, London, 1735, is in MQA along with three sets of the Opera of Ovid, 3 vols., London, 1815; 3 vols., Paris, 1762; and 5 vols., Oxford, 1825, two of which (1815 and 1825) were CFA’s. His extensive reading in all the varieties of Ovid’s works during the following months suggests that he was using one of the editions of the Opera.