By 16 he had read - among other things - all eight volumes (more than 500 pages each) of David Hume's History of England, Catherine Macaulay's eight-volume The History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line, William Robertson's three-volume The History of the Reign of Charles V, Robert Watson's two-volume The History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain, Thomas Davies's Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Edward Gibbon's six-volume epic The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and the two-volume landmark work in economics by Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
By the time he was ten years old, for example, John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, had read Shakespeare's Tempest, As You Like It, Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, and King Lear.
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