History was the true source of “solid instruction,” Adams wrote to the boy encouragingly. He must read Thucydides’s history of the Peloponnesian War. There was no better preparation, whatever part he was called to play on “the stage of life.” It was best read in the original Greek, of course, but he could find a reliable translation among his father’s books. (Long afterward, writing of this time in his boyhood, John Quincy Adams would recall secreting himself in a closet to smoke tobacco and read Milton’s Paradise Lost, trying without success to determine what “recondite charm” in them gave
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