Mr. Everett's youngest sister-in-law, Abigail Brooks. The wreck
of parties which marked the reign of Andrew Jackson had
interfered with many promising careers, that of Edward Everett
among the rest, but he had risen with the Whig Party to power,
had gone as Minister to England, and had returned to America with
the halo of a European reputation, and undisputed rank second
only to Daniel Webster as the orator and representative figure of
Boston. The other brother-in-law, Dr. Frothingham, belonged to
the same clerical school, though in manner rather the less
clerical of the two. Neither of them had much in common with Mr.
Adams, who was a younger man, greatly biassed by his father, and
by the inherited feud between Quincy and State Street; but
personal relations were friendly as far as a boy could see, and
the innumerable cousins went regularly to the First Church every
Sunday in winter, and slept through their uncle's sermons,
without once thinking to ask what the sermons were supposed to
mean for them. For two hundred years the First Church had seen
the same little boys, sleeping more or less soundly under the
same or similar conditions, and dimly conscious of the same
feuds; but the feuds had never ceased, and the boys had always
grown up to inherit them. Those of the generation of 1812 had
mostly disappeared in 1850; death had cleared that score; the
quarrels of John Adams, and those of John Quincy Adams were no
longer acutely personal; the game was considered as drawn; and
Charles Francis Adams might then have taken his inherited rights
of political leadership in succession to Mr. Webster and Mr.
Everett, his seniors. Between him and State Street the relation
was more natural than between Edward Everett and State Street;
but instead of doing so, Charles Francis Adams drew himself aloof
and renewed the old war which had already lasted since 1700. He