MISCELLANIES, SELECTED FROM THE PUBLIC JOURNALS. OBITUARY NOTICE OF MRS. ABIGAIL ADAMS. THE late wife of the Ex-President Adams who died at Quincy on the 28th of October, 1818, aged 74, was a woman, whose talents and virtues will place her on the list of those, who have benefited their generation and honoured their country. She was the daughter of a New-England clergyman, settled within a few miles of Boston; a man respectable in his holy office, and who educated his children in the best manner of the times an unquestionable proof of his good sense. The personal and mental accomplishments of his daughter attracted the attention and secured the respect and affections of Mr. Adams, then a young man of distinction and promise at the bar of Massachusetts. They were married in the year 1764, and resided in Boston. The revolutionary difficulties were then fast increasing, and Mr. Adams was conspicuously engaged. When a continental congress was formed, he was sent a delegate from Massachusetts to this body. It was a perilous moment, The wise were baffled, the courageous hesitated, and the great mass of the people were inflamed, but confused; they had no fixed and settled purpose, but all was left for the development of time. Mr. Adams was one of the boldest in the march of hon B est resistance to tyranny. He looked farther than the business of the day, and ventured, at that early period, to suggest plans of self-government and independence. To Mrs. Adams he communicated his thoughts freely on all these high matters of state; for he had the fullest confidence in her spirit, prudence, secrecy, and good sense, without the test, which the Roman Portia gave her lord to gain his confidence, in matters of policy, "when the state was out of joint." When Mr. Adams was appointed to represent his country at the court of St. James, his wife went with him, and such was her exquisite sense of propriety, her republican simplicity, her delicate and refined manners, her firmness and dignity, that she charmed the proud circles, in which she moved, and they speak of her, to this day, as one of the finest women, that ever graced an embassy to that country. When Mr. Adams was chosen Vice-President, she was the same unaffected, intelligent, and elegant woman. No little managements, no private views, no sly interference with public affairs, was ever, for a moment, charged to her. When her husband came to the chair of the chief magistrate, then the widest field opened for the exercise of all the talents and acquirements of Mrs. Adams; and such was her whole course, that her fondest admirers were not disappointed. She graced the table by her courtesy, and elegance of manners, and delighted her guests by the powers of her conversation. Through the drawing room she diffused ease and urbanity, and gave the charm of modesty and sincerity to the interchanges of civility. But this was not all; her acquaintance with public affairs, her discrimination of character, her discernment of the signs of the times, and her pure patriotism, made her an excellent cabinet minister; and, to the everlasting honour of her husband, he never forgot or undervalued her worth; and, in the pride of place and power, he never despised the New-England simplicity of manners, in which it is a rule to take counsel from a wife. The politicians of that period speak with enthusiasm of her foresight, her prudence, and the wisdom of her |