willing to answer his questions. He worked, after a fashion; not
very hard, but as much as the Government would have required of
him for nine hundred dollars a year; and his work defied
frivolity. He got more pleasure from writing than the world ever
got from reading him, for his work was not amusing, nor was he.
One must not try to amuse moneylenders or investors, and this was
the class to which he began by appealing. He gave three months to
an article on the finances of the United States, just then a
subject greatly needing treatment; and when he had finished it,
he sent it to London to his friend Henry Reeve, the ponderous
editor of the Edinburgh Review. Reeve probably thought it good;
at all events, he said so; and he printed it in April. Of course
it was reprinted in America, but in England such articles were
still anonymous, and the author remained unknown.

The author was not then asking for advertisement, and made no
claim for credit. His object was literary. He wanted to win a
place on the staff of the Edinburgh Review, under the vast shadow
of Lord Macaulay; and, to a young American in 1868, such rank
seemed colossal -- the highest in the literary world -- as it had
been only five-and-twenty years before. Time and tide had flowed
since then, but the position still flattered vanity, though it
brought no other flattery or reward except the regular thirty
pounds of pay -- fifty dollars a month, measured in time and
labor.

The Edinburgh article finished, he set himself to work on a
scheme for the North American Review. In England, Lord Robert
Cecil had invented for the London Quarterly an annual review of
politics which he called the "Session." Adams stole the idea and