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Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, Junior, of Massachusetts: 1744-1775 by Josiah Quincy;Life of Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts by Edmund Quincy; Speeches Delivered in theCongress of the United States by Josiah Quincy; Edmund QuincyThe North American Review, Vol. 120, No. 246 (Jan., 1875), pp. 235-236Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25109900 .

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1875.] The Quincy Memoirs and Speeches. 235

dency to become exclusively political. With this volume termi

nates the record of sixteen years passed in diplomatic life in Eu

rope, most of it in the midst of violent public commotion. For

the future Mr. Adams must be seen only at home in times of peace,

where we know more about his doings already. The life of thirty

remaining years will therefore be doubtless of a somewhat different

character. Yet the characteristic features of the man as already

developed are scarcely likely to change. It is the story of a busy career told with more continuity and minuteness than probably that

of any other eminent statesman on record. To many of the com

munity it may probably serve as primary instruction in a consider

able portion of our annals now pretty generally neglected.

14. ? 1. Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, Junior, of Massachu

setts : 1744-1775. By his Son, Josiah Quincy. Second edition.

Boston : Press of John Wilson and Son. 1874. 2. Life of Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts. By his Son, Edmund Quin

cy. Sixth edition. Boston : Little, Brown, & Co. 1874. 3. Speeches delivered in the Congress of the United States. By Josiah

Quincy. 1805 -1813. Edited by his Son, Edmund Quincy. Bos ton : Little, Brown, & Co. 1874.

In these books the public has at last the advantage of possessing a

uniform and excellent edition of the memoirs and personal remains of

the two Quincys. There is, it is true, nothing in these three volumes

which is new, except the title-pages. There is nothing, therefore, to

justify an extended criticism, or to call for renewed examination, so

far at least as the separate volumes are concerned. Yet taking them

together, as a series, their appearance in this new form may be said

to create almost a new work.

The "

Saturday Review," or some such English periodical, in no

ticing, not long since, the new Memoirs of Mr. J. Q. Adams, informed

its readers, with its usual depth of study and zeal for sound informa

tion, that the Adams family was the only one in all America which could be considered as a family at all, in the English sense of the term. Never was there a grosser misconception of the society which

the reviewer attempted to describe. From a Massachusetts point of

view, the Adamses are hardly a

family at all ; they are a creation of

yesterday, barely a century old. The Quincys are, strictly speaking,

an old family. They belonged to the colonial aristocracy. The first Edmund Quincy came to Boston with John Cotton in 1633. From

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236 The Quincy Memoirs and Speeches. [Jan.

that day to this, the family has always been a prominent one in the colonial and State annals. In a

community which, with a pure de

mocracy, is still second to none in the tenacity with which it main

tains family traditions and pride of descent, and where hardly a dis

tinguished family name of the colonial time is without its living and

pugnacious representative to-day, the Quincy s are an interesting and

an important historical study. Few readers need to be told how attractive the two Memoirs of

father and son are to all persons who rise above the level of novels.

Mr. Edmund Quincy's Life of his father is a model, as all the world

knows ; that father's Life of his own father is less known to this gen eration, but not less worth reading. The Life of the elder Quincy is, however, only

a fragment ; he died at thirty-one. The younger Quincy

lived to be ninety-two, but, with the true instinct of the old colonial

families, cut short his own most brilliant national career at forty-one, and retired to the more congenial pursuits of his native city and

Province. To complete the record of his Congressional life, his

speeches are now published in a separate volume. The merits or

defects of these are matter for more serious consideration than can

now be given them; but if any despondent patriot of the present day, inclined to despair at the condition of public affairs, wishes to ob

tain comfort and encouragement, he can easily do so by reading Mr.

Josiah Quincy's speeches and the comments of Mr. Edmund Quincy

upon them. If John Adams could console Josiah Quincy in 1811 by writing that "we were no better than you," the generation of 1875

may obtain similar comfort at the same source.

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