A."
From her husband's retirement from the Presidency in 1801, to the close
of her life in 1818, Mrs. Adams remained constantly at Quincy. Cheerful,
contented, and happy, she devoted her last years, in that rural
seclusion, to the reciprocities of friendship and love, to offices of
kindness and charity, and, in short, to all those duties which tend to
ripen the Christian for an exchange of worlds.
But it would be doing injustice to her character and leaving one of her
noblest deeds unrecorded, to close without mentioning the influence for
good which she exerted over Mr. Adams, and her part in the work of
making him what he was. That he was sensible of the benignant influence
of wives, may be gathered from the following letter, which was addressed
to Mrs. Adams from Philadelphia, on the 11th of August, 1777:
"I think I have sometimes observed to you in conversation, that upon
examining the biography of illustrious men you will generally find some
female about them, in the relation of mother or wife or sister, to whose
instigation a great part of their merit is to be ascribed. You will find
a curious example of this in the case of Aspasia, the wife of Pericles.
She was a woman of the greatest beauty and the first genius. She taught
him, it is said, his refined maxims of policy, his lofty imperial
eloquence, nay, even composed the speeches on which so great a share of
his reputation was founded.
"I wish some of our great men had such wives.
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