190 ADAM SMITH. 



of his great work the t Inquiry into the Nature and 

 Causes of the Wealth of Nations ;' at first published 

 in two quarto volumes, and afterwards in three octavo, 

 Mr. Hume lived to see it, having died in the autumn 

 of the same year ; and he immediately wrote to express 

 his high sense of its merits, specifying accurately 

 the chief points of its excellence " depth, solidity, 

 acuteness, with much illustration of curious facts ;" to 

 which, if we add the extraordinary merit of showing 

 in what way economical reasoning should be conducted 

 with a constant recourse to the general principles 

 of human nature, and a distrust of all empirical details, 

 though with a due attention to ascertained facts of a 

 general and not a topical or accidental class we sum 

 up the great services rendered to science, as well as to 

 government and legislation generally, by this cele- 

 brated work. In regard to the originality of its views, 

 it ranks, perhaps, less highly, as most of its doctrines 

 had been broached by the Italian writers and the 

 French economists, and still more by Mr. Hume in his 

 * Political Discourses.' We must, however, bear in 

 mind, that Dr. Smith had begun to lecture upon those 

 subjects as early as the year after he settled in 

 Glasgow, that is, in 1752, when Mr. Hume's Essays 

 were published; and in 1755 he drew up a paper 

 containing an abstract of his doctrines, which he 

 asserts that he taught the winter before he left Edin- 

 burgh, and consequently in 1750. As far as regards 

 himself, therefore, we may affirm that those opinions 

 were not borrowed from any others, but were the re- 

 sults of his own speculations.* 



The two years immediately following the publication 

 of his work he passed chiefly in London, and lived in the 

 society of the persons most distinguished for political 

 and for literary eminence. His appointment as Com- 



* He says that they are contained in lectures which he had composed 

 and had caused to be written in the hand of an amanuensis, who left his 

 service in 1749 or the beginning of 1750. 



