wife who penned such wise and inspiriting words to her husband entering on other occasions with the delight of a _mondaine_ into a court or republican function, describing the gowns of the women, their faces and their manners, with the minuteness and accuracy of a Parisian. Was there ever anything written more spirited than Mrs. Adams’s description of Madame Helvetius at Passy, throwing her arms about the neck of _ce cher Franklin_? or her picture of Queen Charlotte and the royal princesses, for whom her admiration was of the scantest? With far different touches was it her pleasure to describe some of the American beauties abroad, for Mrs. Adams was always a true daughter of New England, and we can read between the lines when she writes of Madame Helvetius’s singular manners, “I should have been greatly astonished at this conduct if the good Doctor [Franklin] had not told me that in this lady I should see a genuine Frenchwoman, wholly free from affectation or stiffness of behavior.”[1] Pleasant it is, and not wholly unprofitable to the student of life and manners, to look into the family room of some Colonial mansion, to hear girlish laughter and raillery about balls and beaux in one corner, while in another the father of the family writes of his aspirations for the nation in which his hopes for his children are bound up, and the mother, looking over his shoulder, sympathizes with his patriotic and fatherly ambitions, while she turns over in her brain, for the hundredth time, the important question of how she and Nancy are to make a respectable appearance at the next Assembly ball, when silks, laces, and feathers are so very dear,--worth their weight in gold, as Mrs. Bache tells us. It is such touches of life as these that we find in the diaries of Sarah Eve, who was living in Philadelphia in 1772, of Eliza Southgate of Scarborough, and of Elizabeth Drinker; in Mrs. Grant’s pictures of New York and Albany life, in which Madame Philip Schuyler is the central figure; or in such letters as those of Thomas Jefferson to his family, of Mrs. Bache, Miss Franks, Lady Cathcart, and Mrs. John Morgan. The latter gives us charming glimpses of Cambridge society in 1776, and tells of dinners, tea-drinking, and reviews in company with the Mifflins, Roberdeaus, and others, of handsome officers and pretty girls. Of one of the latter she speaks, in a letter to her mother, in a manner which reveals her own loveliness of character quite as clearly as it does the external charms of the beauty whom all the world and her own husband admire. “The one that drew every one’s attention,” she writes, “was the famous Jersey beauty, Miss Keyes, who is now on a visit to Mr. Roberdeau. She may justly be said to be fairest where thousands are fair. I have had an opportunity of seeing her, and think her a most beautiful creature, and what makes her still more engaging is her not betraying the least consciousness of her own perfections.