"Bowdoin, also, was not firm in health, and though most active and useful in the Council, had thus far done little elsewhere. Hawley, far in the interior, was often absent from the centre in critical times, and somewhat unreliable through a strange moodiness. Cushing was weak. Hancock was hampered by foibles that some times quite canceled his merits. Quincy was a brilliant youth, and, like a youth, sometimes fickle. We have seen him ready to temporize, when to falter was destruction, as at the time of the casting over of the tea; again in unwise fervor, he would counsel assassination as a proper expedient. Warren, too, could rush into extremes of rashness and ferocity, wishing that he might wade to the knees in blood, and had just reached sober, self-reliant manhood when he was taken off. "John Adams showed only an intermittent zeal in the public cause until the preliminary work was done, and Benjamin Church, half-hearted and venal, early began the double-dealing which was to bring him to a traitor's end. There was need in this group of a man of sufficient ascendency, thorough intellect and character, to win deference from all--wise enough to see always the supreme end, to know what each instrument was fit for, and to bring all forces to bear in the right way--a man of consummate adroitness, to sail in torpedo-sown waters without exciting an explosion, though conducting wires of local prejudice, class sensitiveness, and personal foible on every hand led straight down to magazines of wrath which might shatter the cause in a moment--a man having resources of his own to such an extent that he could supplement from himself what was wanting in others--always awake, though others might want to sleep, always at work though others might be tired--a man devoted, without thought of personal gain or fame, simply and solely to the public cause. Such a man there was, and his name was Samuel Adams." OTIS AND ADAMS. Professor Hosmer thus compares Otis and Adams: "Otis' power was so magnetic that a Boston town meeting, upon his mere entering, would break out into shouts and clapping, and if he spoke he produced effects which may be compared with the sway exercised by Chatham, whom as an orator he much resembled. Long after disease had made him utterly untrustworthy, his spell remained. He brought the American cause to the brink of ruin, because the people would follow him, though he was shattered. "Of this gift Samuel Adams possessed little. He was always in speech, straightforward and sensible, and upon occasion could be impressive, but his endowment was not that of the mouth of gold. "While Otis was fitful, vacillating and morbid, Samuel Adams was persistent, undeviating, and sanity itself. While Samuel Adams never abated by a hair his opposition to the British policy, James Otis, who at the outset had given the watch-word to the patriots, later, after Parliament had passed the Stamp Act, said: