No man can adequately explain the persistent fascination which it has had, and which it still has, for the American people, or for its undiminished power over them, without taking into account its extraordinary literary merits--its possession of the witchery of true substance wedded to perfect form:--its massiveness and incisiveness of thought, its art in the marshalling of the topics with which it deals, its symmetry, its energy, the definiteness and limpidity of its statements, its exquisite diction, at once terse, musical, and electric; and, as an essential part of this literary outfit, many of those spiritual notes which can attract and enthrall our hearts,--veneration for God, veneration for man, veneration for principle, respect for public opinion, moral earnestness, moral courage, optimism, a stately and noble pathos, finally, self-sacrificing devotion to a cause so great as to be herein identified with the happiness, not of one people only, or of one race only, but of human nature itself. We may be altogether sure that no genuine development of literary taste among the American people in any period of our future history can result in serious misfortune to this particular specimen of American literature. _Samuel Adams._--Samuel Adams was a man of letters, but he was so only because he was above all things a man of affairs. Of literary art, in certain forms, he was no mean master; of literary art for art’s sake, he was entirely regardless. He was perhaps the most voluminous political writer of his time in America, and the most influential political writer of his time in New England; but everything that he wrote was meant for a definite practical purpose, and nothing that he wrote seemed to have had any interest for him aside from that purpose. Deep as is the obscurity which has fallen upon his literary services in the cause of the Revolution, the fame of those services was, at the time of them, almost unrivalled by that of any other writer, at least in the colonies east of the Hudson River. Born in Boston in 1722, graduated at Harvard in 1740, he early showed an invincible passion and aptitude for politics. One principal instrument by means of which Samuel Adams so greatly moulded public opinion, and shaped political and even military procedure, was the pen. Of modern politicians, he was among the first to recognise the power of public opinion in directing public events, and likewise the power of the newspaper in directing public opinion. It was, therefore, an essential part of his method as a politician to acquire and to exercise the art of literary statement in a form suited to that particular end. He had the instinct of a great journalist, and of a great journalist willing to screen his individuality behind his journal. In this service, it was not Samuel Adams that Samuel Adams cared to put and to keep before the public,--it was the ideas of Samuel Adams. Accordingly, of all American