brothers could be more unlike than Charles Francis, John Quincy
and Henry Adams. Brooks Adams I did not know. They represented the
fourth generation of the brainiest pedigree--that is in continuous
line--known to our family history. Henry thought he was a philosopher
and tried to be one. He thought he was a man of the world and wanted to
be one. He was, in spite of himself, a provincial.

Provincialism is not necessarily rustic, even suburban. There is no
provincial quite so provincial as he who has passed his life in great
cities. The Parisian boulevardier taken away from the asphalt, the
cockney a little off Clapham Common and the Strand, is lost. Henry Adams
knew his London and his Paris, his Boston and his Quincy--we must not
forget Quincy--well. But he had been born, and had grown up, between the
lids of history, and for all his learning and travel he never got very
far outside them.

In manner and manners, tone and cast of thought he was
English--delightfully English--though he cultivated the cosmopolite.
His house in the national capital, facing the Executive Mansion across
Lafayette Square--especially during the life of his wife, an adorable
woman, who made up in sweetness and tact for some of the qualities
lacking in her husband--was an intellectual and high-bred center, a
rendezvous for the best ton and the most accepted people. The Adamses
may be said to have succeeded the Eameses as leaders in semi-social,
semi-literary and semi-political society.

There was a trio--I used to call them the Three Musketeers of
Culture--John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge and Henry Adams. They made an
interesting and inseparable trinity--Caleb Cushing, Robert J. Walker and
Charles Sumner not more so--and it was worth while to let them have the
floor and to hear them talk; Lodge, cool and wary as a politician should
be; Hay, helterskelter, the real man of the world crossed on a Western
stock; and Adams, something of a literatteur, a statesman and a cynic.

John Randolph Tucker, who when he was in Congress often met Henry at
dinners and the like, said to him on the appearance of the early volumes
of his History of the United States: "I am not disappointed, for how
could an Adams be expected to do justice to a Randolph?"

While he was writing this history Adams said to me: "There is an old
villain--next to Andrew Jackson the greatest villain of his time--a
Kentuckian--don't say he was a kinsman of yours!--whose papers, if he
left an