He enjoyed a great opportunity; he might even
have figured as a new Benjamin Franklin with all society at his
feet; he might have roared as lion of the season and made the
social path of the American Minister almost impassable; but Mr.
Adams had his usual luck in enemies, who were always his most
valuable allies if his friends only let them alone. Mason was his
greatest diplomatic triumph. He had his collision with
Palmerston; he drove Russell off the field; he swept the board
before Cockburn; he overbore Slidell; but he never lifted a
finger against Mason, who became his bulwark of defence.
Possibly Jefferson Davis and Mr. Mason shared two defects in
common which might have led them into this serious mistake.
Neither could have had much knowledge of the world, and both must
have been unconscious of humor. Yet at the same time with Mason,
President Davis sent out Slidell to France and Mr. Lamar to
Russia. Some twenty years later, in the shifting search for the
education he never found, Adams became closely intimate at
Washington with Lamar, then Senator from Mississippi, who had
grown to be one of the calmest, most reasonable and most amiable
Union men in the United States, and quite unusual in social
charm. In 1860 he passed for the worst of Southern fire-eaters,
but he was an eccentric by environment, not by nature; above all
his Southern eccentricities, he had tact and humor; and perhaps
this was a reason why Mr.
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