ry and polite pieces in
prose, printed and manuscripts, in her father's well furnished
library.... She had indeed such a thirst after knowledge that the
leisure of the day did not suffice, but she spent whole nights in
reading...."

"I find she was sometimes fired with a laudable ambition of
raising the honor of her sex, who are therefore under obligations
to her; and all will be ready to own she had a fine genius, and
is to be placed among those who have excelled."

"...What greatly contributed to increase her knowledge, in
divinity, history, physic, controversy, as well as poetry, was
her attentive hearing most that I read upon those heads through
the long evenings of the winters as we sat together."[62]

Mrs. Adams was still another example of that rare womanliness which
could combine with practical domestic ability a taste for high
intellectual pursuits. During the Revolutionary days in the hour of
deepest anxiety for the welfare of her husband and of her country, she
wrote to Mr. Adams: "I have taken a great fondness for reading Rollin's
_Ancient History_ since you left me. I am determined to go through with
it, if possible, in these days of solitude."[63] And again in a letter
written on December 5, 1773, to Mercy Warren, she says: "I send with
this the first volume of Moliere and should be glad of your opinion of
the plays. I cannot be brought to like them. There seems to me to be a
general want of spirit. At the close of every one, I have felt
disappointed. There are no characters but what appear unfinished; and he
seems to have ridiculed vice without engaging us to virtue.... There is
one negative virtue of which he is possessed, I mean that of decency....
I fear I shall incur the charge of vanity by thus criticising an author
who has met with so much applause.... I should not have done it, if we
had not conversed about it before."[64]

Evidently, at least a few of those colonial dames who are popularly
supposed to have stayed at home and "tended their knitting" were
interested in and enthusiastically conversed about some rather classic
authors and rather deep questions. Mrs. Grant has told us of the aunt of
General Philip Schuyler, a woman of great force of character and
magnetic personality: "She was a great manager of her time and always
contrived to create leisure hours for reading; for that kind of
conversation which is properly styled gossipi