Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Politics volume 4 .djvu/176

164 tious; it is equally true of himself. Perhaps Mr. Adams had little humour, but certainly a giant's wit; he used it tyrannously and like a giant. Wit has its place in debate; in controversy it is a legitimate weapon, offensive and defensive. After one has beaten the single barley-corn of good sense out of a whole waggon-load of chaif, the easiest way to be rid of the rubbish is to burn it up with the lightning of wit ; the danger is, that the burning should begin before the separation is made; that the fire consume the good and bad indifferently. When argument is edged and pointed with wit, it is doubly effective; but when that edge is jagged with ill-will, poisoned, too, with personal spleen, then it becomes a weapon unworthy of a man. Sometimes Mr. Adams used his wit as fairly as his wisdom; and bags of wind, on which Hercules might have stamped and beaten a twelvemonth, but in vain—at a single puncture from that keen wit gave up their ghost and flattened into nothing; a vanity to all men, but a vexation of spirit to him who had blown them so full of his own soul. But sometimes, yes, often, Mr. Adams's wit performs a different part: it sits as a judge, unjust and unforgiving, "often deciding wrong, and when right from wrong motives." It was the small dagger with which he smote the fallen foe. It is a poor praise for a famous man, churchman, or statesman, to beat a blackguard with his own weapons. It must be confessed, that, in controversy, Mr. Adams's arrows were sharp and deftly delivered; but they were often barbed, and sometimes poisoned. True, he encountered more political opposition than any man in the nation. For more than forty years he has never been without bitter and unrelenting enemies, public and private. No man in America, perhaps, ever had such provocations; surely, none had ever such opportunities to reply without retorting. How much better would it have been, if, at the end of that long life and fifty years' war, he could say he had never wasted a shot ; had never sinned with his lips, nor once feathered his public arrow with private spleen! Wise as he was, and old, he never learned that for undeserved calumny, for personal insult and abuse, there is one answer, Christian, manly, and irrefutable—the dignity of silence. A just man can afford to wait till the storm of abuse shall spend its rage and vanish under the