her to England would be
to enjoy a life precisely fitted to his natural and acquired tastes,
to mingle with the men who were making history, to be cognizant of the
weightiest of public affairs, to profit by all that the grandest city
in the world had to show. It was easy to be not only allured by the
prospect but also to be deceived by its apparent advantages. Adams,
however, had the sense and courage to turn his back on it, and to go
home to the meagre shores and small society of New England, there to
become a boy again, to enter Harvard College, and come under all its
at that time rigid and petty regulations. It almost seems a mistake,
but it was not. Already he was too ripe and too wise to blunder. He
himself gives us his characteristic and sufficient reasons:--

"Were I now to go with my father probably my immediate
satisfaction might be greater than it will be in returning (p. 016)
to America. After having been travelling for these seven years
almost and all over Europe, and having been in the world and among
company for three; to return to spend one or two years in the
pale of a college, subjected to all the rules which I have so long
been freed from; and afterwards not expect (however good an opinion
I may have of myself) to bring myself into notice under three or
four years more, if ever! It is really a prospect somewhat
discouraging for a youth of my ambition, (for I have ambition
though I hope its object is laudable). But still

'Oh! how wretched
Is that poor man, that hangs on Princes' favors,'

or on those of any body else. I am determined that so long as I
shall be able to get my own living in an honorable manner, I will
depend upon no one. My father has been so much taken up all his
lifetime with the interests of the public, that his own fortune
has suffered by it: so that his children will have to provide for
themselves, which I shall never be able to do if I loiter away my
precious time in Europe and shun going home until I am forced to
it. With an ordinary share of common sense, which I hope I enjoy,
at least in America I can live _independent_ and _free_; and
rather than live otherwise I would wish to die before the time
when I shall be left at my own discretion. I have before me a
striking example of the distressing and humiliating situation a
pers