Note 5 — INTRODUCTION.

Adams wrote also an account of his journey to Silesia in July, 1800. This was in the form of twenty-nine letters to his brother, written during the trip, and thirteen more added after his return to Berlin. Although they were private communications, the editor of the Port Folio secured them for his magazine and printed them anonymously, without suppressing personal references, as the author would have done, had he known of the publication.

"Whether these passages ever came under the observation of the persons affected is not certain. So long as they remained confined to the columns of an American publication of that day, the probabilities would favor the negative. But they were not so confined. Again, without the knowledge or consent of the author, an individual, unknown to him, but fully aware of the facts in the case nevertheless took the collection from the Portfolio to London, and there had them printed for his own benefit, in an octavo volume, in the year 1804. From this copy they were rendered into German, and published at Breslau the next year, with notes, by Frederick Albert Zimmerman; and in 1807 a translation made into French, by J. Dupuy, was published in Paris by Dentu.

"Thus it happened that these letters, originally intended as purely familiar correspondence, obtained a free circulation over a large part of Europe without the smallest agency on the part of the author, or any opportunity to correct and modify them as he certainly would have done had he ever possessed the power."

Memoirs of John Quincy Adams, Edited by Charles Francis Adams. 12 vols., Philadelphia, 1874. Vol. I, 240-241.

The American publication began in the Port Folio, I-1, Jan. 3, 1801, Phila. For a review of the English edition, cf. The Monthly Review or Literary Journal, XLV-350, December, 1804, London.