Memoir of the Life of John Quincy Adams. | Page 9

spirit of the work. "Count Finkenstein resides in this vicinity. He was formerly president of the judicial tribunal at Custrin, but was dismissed by Frederic II., on the occasion of the miller Arnold's famous lawsuit; an instance in which the great king, from mere love of justice, committed the greatest injustice that ever cast a shade upon his character. His anxiety, upon that occasion, to prove to the world that in his courts of justice the beggar should be upon the same footing as the prince, made him forget that in substantial justice the maxim ought to bear alike on both sides, and that the prince should obtain his right as much as the beggar. Count Finkenstein and several other judges of the court at Custrin, together with the High Chancellor F��rst, were all dismissed from their places, for doing their duty, and persisting in it, contrary to the will of the king, who, substituting his ideas of natural equity in place of the prescriptions of positive law, treated them with the utmost severity, for conduct which ought to have received his fullest approbation."
"Dr. Johnson, in his Life of Watts, has bestowed a just and exalted encomium upon him for not disdaining to descend from the pride of genius and the dignity of science to write for the wants and the capacities of children. 'Every man acquainted,' says he, 'with the common principles of human action, will look with veneration on the writer who is at one time combating Locke, and at another making a catechism for children in their fourth year.' But how much greater still is the tribute of admiration, irresistibly drawn from us, when we behold an absolute monarch, the greatest general of his age, eminent as a writer in the highest departments of literature, descending, in a manner, to teach the alphabet to the children of his kingdom; bestowing his care, his persevering assiduity, his influence and his power, in diffusing plain and useful knowledge among his subjects, in opening to their minds the first and most important page of the book of science, in filling the whole atmosphere they breathed with that intellectual fragrance which had before been imprisoned in the vials of learning, or enclosed within the gardens of wealth! Immortal Frederic! when seated on the throne of Prussia, with kneeling millions at thy feet, thou wert only a king; on the fields of Lutzen, of Torndoff, of Rosbach, of so many other scenes of human blood and anguish, thou wert only a hero; even in thy rare and glorious converse with the muses and with science thou wert only a philosopher, a historian, a poet; but in this generous ardor, this active, enlightened zeal for the education of thy people, thou wert truly great--the father of thy country--the benefactor of mankind!"
In 1801, Mr. Adams received from his government permission to return home. After taking leave with the customary formalities, he left Berlin, sailed from Hamburg, and on the 4th of September, 1801, arrived in the United States. During his residence in Berlin his time was devoted to official labor and intellectual improvement; yet his letters show that he was seldom, if ever, self-satisfied, being filled with aspirations after something higher and better than he could accomplish. His translations, at this period, embraced many satires of Juvenal, and Wieland's Oberon from the original, into English verse; the last he intended for the press, had it not been superseded by the version of Sotheby. He also translated from the German a treatise, by Gentz, on the origin and principles of the American Revolution, which he finished and transmitted to the United States for publication, eulogizing it "as one of the clearest accounts that exist of the rise and progress of the American Revolution, in so small a compass; rescuing it from the disgraceful imputation of its having proceeded from the same principles, and of its being conducted in the same spirit, as that of France. This error has nowhere been more frequently repeated, nowhere been of more pernicious tendency, than in America itself."
The last years of Mr. Adams' residence at the Court of Berlin were painfully affected by the bitter party animadversions which assailed his father's administration, and which did not fail to bring within the sphere of their asperities the missions he had himself held in Europe. These feelings became intense on the publication of Alexander Hamilton's letter "On the Public Conduct and Character of John Adams, President of the United States." This letter, with the divisions in the cabinet at Washington, occasioned by the political friends of Hamilton, excited in the breast of Mr. Adams a spirit, which, from affection for his father, and a sense of the injustice done to him, could not be otherwise than indignant. Though concealed, it was not