John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. RMI 
of moral obligation, and account of the nature of virtue, defec- 
tive. He ceased not to hold Locke’s writings in great esteem. 
The older English sermonists met his taste ; Tillotson, Samuel 
Clarke, Drs. Atterbury, Hoadly, Sherlock, Secker, South. 
Swift’s, Sterne’s, and Blair’s Sermons also he was fond of perus- 
ing. He spoke of Addison’s papers on “the Pleasures of the 
Imagination” with emphatic praise, and advised a young friend to 
transcribe them into his common-place book. He honoured the 
writings of Barrow, pronouncing him a quarry of taste, sentiment, 
and expression. 
After Mr. Adams retired from public life to his farm, he pe- 
rused some of the best works on agriculture, and paid some 
attention to natural history. 
As to his manner of study, he read with selection, fre- 
quently with a particular purpose to gain a full view of a subject ; 
he read with attention, with patience, with meditation, and with 
revision, so that his reading all turned to use, and nourished and 
invigorated without encumbering his mind. He sometimes wrote 
an abstract of what he had acquired on a subject from a course 
of reading. I have seen a specimen of this sort of exercise in 
an essay on Alga fucus (sea-weed), containing all the information 
he could obtain from books, as well as his own observations and 
experience, and showing the qualities and uses of the plant, with 
which he had learned to enrich his lands. 
His time was distributed by a general, not a punctilious meth- 
od; since, with the industrious, study and business commonly 
point out their own time. He profited himself by conversation 
as well as reading, ever ready to receive as well as to give. 
Whilst abroad, he made the acquaintance of many of the master- 
spirits in politics, philosophy, and letters, 
