416 Biographical Account of [Dec". 



may convince you ; and even though neither of these two events 

 should happen, the offence, I apprehend, will not be great, 

 either to them or to you. I have the honour to be, &c. 



" Adam Smith." 



In the year 1790, Mr. Tytlerreadin the Society those papers 

 on Translation, which they who heard them will remember to 

 have been listened to with so much pleasure, and which he soon 

 after published without his name, and under the modest title of 

 an " Essay on the Principles of Translation." The work was 

 scarcely published when it occasioned a correspondence with the 

 late learned and ingenious Dr. Campbell, Principal of Marischal 

 College, Aberdeen, from which, however painful at first, Mr. 

 Tytler might easily have foretold its future fortune in the literary 

 world. Dr. Campbell had, some time previous to this, published 

 his Translation of the Gospels, to which he had prefixed, in a 

 preliminary dissertation, some very acute and ingenious obser- 

 vations upon the principles of translation. Upon the publication 

 of Mr. Tytler's anonymous work, he immediately procured it, 

 and was so much struck with the coincidence of their views 

 upon the subject that he wrote to his printer Mr. Creech to know 

 who was the author ; and while he acknowledged himself " to 

 have been flattered not a little to think that he had in these 

 points the concurrence in judgment of a writer so ingenious," he 

 expressed at the same time some suspicion that the author might 

 have borrowed from his Dissertation without acknowledging the 

 obligation. Mr. Creech, with great propriety, communicated 

 the letter to Mr. Tytler ; and he instantly wrote to Dr. Campbell, 

 acknowledging himself to be the author, but assuring him that 

 the coincidence of sentiment was purely accidental, and that the 

 name of Dr. Campbell's work had never reached him until his 

 own had been composed. " The coincidence of our general 

 principles (says Mr. Tytler) is indeed a thing flattering to myself; 

 but I cannot consider it as a thing at all extraordinary. There 

 seems to me no wonder that two persons moderately conversant 

 in critical occupations (I am far from thinking equally so) sitting 

 down professedly to investigate the principles of this art, should 

 hit upon the same principles, when, in fact, there are none 

 other to hit upon, and the truth of these is acknowledged at their 

 first enunciation. In my opinion there would, on the contrary) 

 be just matter of wonder if they did not hit upon them. But in 

 truth (concludes Mr. Tytler), the merit of this little essay (if it 

 has any) does not, in my opinion, lie in these particulars. It lies 

 in the establishment of those various subordinate rules and pre- 

 cepts which apply to the nicer parts and difficulties of the art of 

 translation ; in deducing those rules and precepts which carry 

 not their own authority in gremio from the general principles 

 which are of acknowledged truth, and in proving and illustrating 

 them by examples. How far you may have anticipated me even 



