the Revolutionist who was rising. John Adams came after, not
wholly by his own ambition, but at the call of inexorable
History, to take the part and place of the great Forerunner.

What must have been the thoughts and emotions of that Forerunner
when the minute men of Massachusetts came firing and charging
after the British soldiers in full retreat from Concord Bridge
and Lexington? With what convulsion must his mind, in
semi-darkness and ruin, have received the news of the still
greater deed at Bunker Hill? History is silent as to what the
broken Titan thought and said in those heroic days.

The patriot in dim eclipse became at times wholly rational, but
with the least excitement his malady would return. In
conversation something of his old brilliancy would return in
flashes. For the rest, the chimes in that high soul no longer
played the music of reason, but gave out only the discords of
insanity. He was never reduced to serious delirium or to violent
frenzy, but he was an insane man; and under this shadow he walked
for the greater part of ten years, during which Independence was
declared and the Revolution fought out to a victorious end.

It was in this period of decline and obscuration that James Otis
witnessed through the gathering shadows the rise to distinction
and fame of many of the patriots whom he had led in the first
campaigns for liberty. John Adams and Hancock were now at the
fore battling for independence. Among those who rose to eminence
in the immortal eighth decade was Samuel Alleyne Otis, who in
1776 was elected a representative in the great Congress of the
Revolution. James did not live to see his brother become speaker