These and other like provocations were not only discouraging but very irritating, and Mr. Adams was not of that careless disposition which is little affected by unjust accusation. On the contrary he was greatly incensed by such treatment, and though he made the most stern and persistent effort to endure an inevitable trial with a patience born of philosophy, since indifference was not at his command, yet he could not refrain from the expression of his sentiments in his secret communings. Occasionally he allowed his wrath to explode with harmless violence between the covers of the Diary, and doubtless he found relief while he discharged his fierce diatribes on these private sheets. His vituperative power was great, and some specimens of it may not come amiss in a sketch of the man. The senators who did not call upon him he regarded as of "rancorous spirit." He spoke of the falsehoods and misrepresentations which "the skunks of party slander ... have been ... squirting round the House of Representatives, thence to issue and perfume the atmosphere of the Union." His most intense hatred and vehement denunciation were reserved for John Randolph, whom he thought an abomination too odious and despicable to be described in words, "the image and superscription of a great man stamped (p. 211) upon base metal." "The besotted violence" of Randolph, he said, has deprived him of "all right to personal civility from me;" and certainly this excommunication from courtesy was made complete and effective. He speaks again of the same victim as a "frequenter of gin lane and beer alley." He indignantly charges that Calhoun, as Speaker, permitted Randolph "in speeches of ten hours long to drink himself drunk with bottled porter, and in raving balderdash of the meridian of Wapping to revile the absent and the present, the living and the dead." This, he says, was "tolerated by Calhoun, because Randolph's ribaldry was all pointed against the Administration, especially against Mr. Clay and me." Again he writes of Randolph: "The rancor of this man's soul against me is that which sustains his life: the agony of [his] envy and hatred of me, and the hope of effecting my downfall, are [his] chief remaining sources of vitality. The issue of the Presidential election will kill [him] by the gratification of [his] revenge." So it was also with W. B. Giles, of Virginia. But Giles's abuse was easier to bear since it had been poured in torrents upon every reputable man, from Washington downwards, who had been prominent in public affairs since the adoption of the Constitution, so that (p. 212) Giles's memory is now preserved from oblivion solely by the connection which he established with the great and honorable statesmen of the Republic by a course of ceaseless attacks upon them. Some of the foregoing expressions of Mr. Adams may be open to objection on the score of good taste; but the provocation was extreme; public retaliation he would not practise, and wrath must sometimes burst forth in language which was not so unusual in that day as it is at present. It is an unquestionable fact, of which the credit to Mr. Adams can hardly be exaggerated, that he never in any single instance found an excuse for an unworthy act on his own part in the fact that competitors or adversaries were resorting to such expedients.