Diary of Charles Francis Adams, volume 4
1832-05-31
I congratulated myself upon my decision of yesterday when I heard the Wind rise during the night, and much more so upon seeing the rain in the morning, so I concluded to remain quietly at home. Upon feeling the time heavy upon my hands I bethought myself what I should begin upon. At this moment I feel myself more out of reading than I have done for some years. In looking round over the Library I felt a great difficulty where to fix and in the process spent an hour or two reading a little fairy story of A. Hamilton.1 And I then fell upon Gibbon’s Memoirs of his own life,2 a book that interested me so much that I continued upon it all the afternoon. I like his style in this work better than I do that of his history. It has not any of that excessive regularity which manifests any thing but the English lan-307guage. His opinions are not always correct, on the contrary I should think most frequently they are the reverse. His politics were considerably inclined to ultra Toryism. Perhaps after all, they are right. I wrote a letter to my Father today.3 Evening very quiet. I need hardly say that I persevere in my Ramblers.
The contes or fantasies of C. Antoine Hamilton, mildly satiric of the taste for the marvelous in the mid-18th century, were included in his Oeuvres-mêlées en prose et en vers. Two copies of the edition of 1749 are at MQA. A copy of the 4-vol., London, 1776, edition is also among JA’s books at the Boston Public Library (
Catalogue of JA’s Library
, p. 113).
Edward Gibbon, Miscellaneous Works with Memoirs of His Life and Writings ... by Himself. A copy with JQA’s bookplate of the 2-vol., London, 1796, edition is now at MQA. Another edition, 3 vols., Dublin, 1796, is also among JA’s books at the Boston Public Library (
Catalogue of JA’s Library
, p. 102).
A lengthy and generally sympathetic analysis, though with reservations, on JQA’s reports on the Bank and on the Tariff (letter in Adams Papers).