field after the day dawned. 1 "Very said "that he was no bigot, and could pleasant," answered one of his compan- hear a prayer from a gentleman of piety ions, supposing him to be contemplat- and virtue who was, at the same time, ing the beauties of the sky. "I mean," a friend to his country. He was a he replied, "this day is a glorious day stranger in Philadelphia, but he had for America." When General Gage, heard that Mr. Duché deserved that shortly after, issued his proclamation, character, and therefore he moved that offering pardon to the rebels, he special- Mr. Duché, an Episcopal clergyman, ly excepted Samuel Adams and John might be desired to read prayers to the Hancock. Well does John Adams, Congress to-morrow morning." nearly half a century afterwards, ex- When John Adams nominated Washclaim, looking back to the men of that ington to the command of the army, the day: "Mr. Adams was born and tem- motion, to the chagrin of his associate, pered a wedge of steel to split the knot Hancock, was seconded by Samuel of lignum vitæ which tied North Adams; though he was afterwards susAmerica to Great Britain. Blunder-pected of favoring the intrigue in oppoheaded as were the British ministry, sition to the commander-in-chief. they had sagacity enough to discriminate from all others, for inexorable vengeance, the two men most to be dreaded by them, Samuel Adams and John Hancock; and had not James Otis been then dead, or worse than dead, his name would have been at the head of the triumvirate." He was present at the time of signing the Declaration of Independence, and put his name to that instrument. At the same time he was placed on the responsible committee to prepare a system of articles of confederation. His course in Congress commanded respect, though to some of the members, as Eliot intimates, he seemed to lack breadth of character for a statesman. "He never appeared to so much advantage in Congress as in Faneuil Hall.” In 1779, he was a member of the An act of Samuel Adams in the Continental Congress reminds us of its sequel in the proceeding by Benjamin Franklin in the Convention of the Constitution; and, with other incidents of his career, suggests an occasional Massachusetts Convention at Camresemblance between the two Boston sages. It was proposed by Cushing to open the Assembly with prayer, but every one feared to awaken the hostility of his neighbor by the selection of a minister. Even Jay, who had a sincere love for all sacred things, demurred, when Samuel Adams, the representative of Puritanism, rose, and 1 Eliot's Biog. Dict., art. Adams. bridge for the formation of a State Constitution, and when the new government went into operation, sat in the Legislature as President of the Senate. He had the opportunity of lending a vigorous support to the administration in the affair of Shay's rebellion. When the new Constitution was before the country, he was a member of the State Ratification Convention, where he was considered a leader of the opposition, For fifty years his pen, his tongue, his activity, were constantly exerted for majority, on the introduction, by Hancock, of the amendments or Conciliatory his country without fee or reward." Resolutions, as they were called: The Let such be the epitaph, penned by one general current of his politics, however, entitled to write it, of the patriot, threw him among the Anti-Federalists Samuel Adams. of his day, at odds with Washington and his cabinet, leaning to Jefferson, suspicious of the Constitution, and favoring French liberty. He was elected Lieutenant Governor in 1789, and annually thereafter till 1794, when he was chosen successor to Hancock, who died in office. In 1797, he retired to private life. The infirmities of age pressed heavily upon him. There is a piteous recollection of these last days in a letter of John Adams to Jefferson, in which he speaks of "Sam Adams, a grief and distress to his family, a weeping, helpless object of compassion for years." Death closed the scene in his eighty-second year, October 2, 1803. In person, Adams was of the average height, muscular and erect, of a Puritan solemnity of manner, which is said to have been assisted in speaking by a defect, a tremulous movement of the head. His character, in its stronger claims, is summed up in the eulogy we have already cited from Bancroft. It does ample justice to his services to the Revolutionary cause, which were undoubtedly great. "Without the character of Samuel Adams," says John Adams, "the true history of the American Revolution can never be written. We may look to Mr. Bancroft, who, it is understood, has stores of hitherto unemployed material at his service, for a revival, in some measure, of the impression of that charm of eloquence in Adams which once swayed tumultuous assemblies, and of which John Adams, conversing with the Chevalier de la Luzerne, in 1779, said, “that Mr. Dickinson and Mr. Jay had eloquence, but it was not so chaste, nor pure, nor nervous as that of Mr. Samuel Adams. He has written, too, some things that would be admired more than anything that has been writ ten in America in the dispute." Some forty years later, the same eulogist asks the question, "Where are his writings? Who can collect them? And if collected, who will ever read them?" Alas, they are gone, the speeches at Faneuil, the resolutions and the corre spondence that were wont to stir the assemblies and set the nation on fire, the quips and cranks, or solemnities, as it may have been, which served their turn with the hard-handed mechanics of Boston, they are gone with the echoes of the greasy palms, where the wit of Yorick went before them: but the spirit of the noble man's work lives in the nation into which it was once breathed. JAMES OTIS. JAMES OTIS; the herald of the Revo- | wards, when he had attained distinction lution in Massachusetts, "the flame at the bar, expressed the wish that he of fire," was born at Great Marshes, in what is now called West Barnstable, February 5, 1725. His family was a very ancient one in the annals of the colony; it traced its American founder to John Otis, one of the first English settlers at Hingham, whose grandson of the same name, born in 1657, removed to Barnstable, and became a noted man in the Provincial councils. He was for thirteen years chief judge of the Common Pleas. His two sons both occupied important positions, at the council and on the bench. One of them was the parent of James Otis, the subject of our sketch. This lineage is worth noting; for it was a peculiarity of the American Revolution, that while it had its great strength in the sympathy of the mass of the people, its first impulses and guiding principles originated with men of station, and chiefly of the legal profession. Young Otis was prepared for Harvard by the Rev. Jonathan Russell, the clergyman of the parish, and in due time received his first degree in 1743. On leaving college, he gave a year and a half to the study of literature before engaging in the study of the law; and so far from regretting this course after had deferred his legal studies longer. It was a shrewd remark, and we think will hold good of the professions generally. Pupils enter them at so unripe an age that people will not trust them, and the memory of their youth remains with the public as an obstacle to their advancement when they are no longer young. Whereas, as Otis advises, by commencing a little later, they are not only more mature and better informed, but the world is willing to believe them so. Otis had a sound taste in literature, and a fondness for its pursuit even to the extent of preparing treatises on Greek and Latin prosody. He was a great admirer of Homer, and like the educated persons of his day, who had not much contemporary literature worth their perusal, fell back in English reading, upon Shakspeare, Milton, Dryden, and Pope. He thought "a lawyer ought never to be without a volume of natural or public law, or moral philosophy, on his table or in his pocket." He had the advantage, in his legal studies, of one of the acutest legal minds of the province, and a fine classical scholar, Jeremiah Gridley, then in the prime of life. It was one of the |