hrase,
he "was guilty of the atrocious crime of being a young man,"--was still
day by day building himself up in the heart and imagination of the
English people, and laboriously opening the path to power of the old
Chatham, whose vehement soul was all alive with the energies of youth,
though lodged in the shattered frame of age. And he so familiarly known
to the American people as old John Adams,--did he lose in mature life a
single racy or splenetic characteristic of the young statesman of the
Colonial period? Is there, indeed, any break in that unity of nature
which connects the second President of the United States with the child
John Adams, the boy John Adams, the tart, blunt, and bold, the sagacious
and self-reliant, young Mr. Adams, the plague and terror of the Tories
of Massachusetts? And his all-accomplished rival and adversary,
Alexander Hamilton,--is he not substantially the same at twenty-five as
at forty-five? Though he has not yet imprinted his mind on the
constitution and practical working of the government, the qualities are
still there:--the poised nature whose vigor is almost hidden in its
harmony; the power of infusing into other minds ideas which they seem to
originate; the wisdom, the moderation, the self-command, the deep
thought which explores principles, the comprehensive thought which
regards relations, the fertile thought which devises measures,--all are
there as unmistakably at twenty-five as on that miserable day, when, in
the tried completeness of his powers, the greatest of American statesmen
died by the hand of the greatest of American reprobates.

But there are also in history four examples of men who seem to have been
statesmen from the nursery,--who early took a leading part in great
designs which affected the whole course of human affairs,--and whom
octogenarians like Nesselrode and Palmerston would be compelled to call
statesmen of the first class. These are Octavius Caesar, more successful
in the arts of policy than even the great Julius, never guilty of
youthful indiscretion, or, we are sorry to say, of youthful virtue;
Maurice of Saxony, the preserver of the Reformed religion in Germany, in
that contest where his youthful sagacity proved more than a match for
the veteran craft of Charles the Fifth; the second William of Orange,
the preserver of the liberties of Europe against the ambition of Louis
XIV., and who, as a child, may be said to have prattled treaties and
lisped despatches