Adams' Popularity

In her thesis Moira P Baker comments on Adams's popularity. She observes that

In his popular compendium of contemporary eloquence, Things Old and New (1658), John Spencer includes more than sixty excerpts from the works of Adams. William London, in addition, lists Adams’ Workes and his Commentary upon the Second Epistle of St. Peter in his Catalogue of the Most Vendible Books in England. To his contemporaries, then, Adams was a respected preacher and writer.

Spencer's work has as its full title Kaina kai palaia Things new and old, or, A store-house of similies, sentences, allegories, apophthegms, adagies, apologues, divine, morall, politicall, &c. : with their severall applications / collected and observed from the writings and sayings of the learned in all ages to this present by John Spencer.