Under Gardiner, Prescott's indifference to study disappeared, and he applied himself so well that he was rapidly advanced from elementary reading to the study of authors so difficult as Æschylus. His biographer, Mr. Ticknor, who was his fellow-pupil at this time, has left us some interesting notes upon the subject of Prescott's literary preferences. It appears that he enjoyed Sophocles, while Horace "interested and excited him beyond his years." The pessimism of Juvenal he disliked, and the crabbed verse of Persius he utterly refused to read. Under private teachers he studied French, Italian, and Spanish,--a rather unusual thing for boys at that time,--and he reluctantly acquired what he regarded as the irreducible minimum of mathematics. It was decided that he should be fitted to enter the Sophomore Class in Harvard, and to this end he devoted his mental energies. Like most boys, he worked hardest upon those studies which related to his college examination, viewing others as more or less superfluous. He did, however, a good deal of miscellaneous reading, opportunities for which he found in the Boston Athenæum. This institution had been opened but a short time before, and its own collection of books, which to-day numbers more than two hundred thousand, was rather meagre; but in it had been deposited some ten thousand volumes, constituting the private library of John Quincy Adams, who was then holding the post of American Minister to Russia. At a time when book-shops were few, and when books were imported from England with much difficulty and expense, these ten thousand volumes seemed an enormous treasure-house of good reading. Prescott browsed through the books after the fashion of a clever boy, picking out what took his fancy and neglecting everything that seemed at all uninteresting. Yet this omnivorous reading stimulated his love of letters and gave to him a larger range of vision than at that time he could probably have acquired in any other way. It is interesting to note the fact that his preference was for old romances--the more extravagant the better--and for tales of wild and lawless adventure. An especial favourite with him was the romance of _Amadis de Gaule_, which he found in Southey's somewhat pedestrian translation, and which appealed intensely to Prescott's imagination and his love of the fantastic.