ADAM SMITH. 



WITH AN ANALYSIS OF HIS GREAT WORK. 



IN the last years of the seventeenth century were born 

 two men, who laid the foundation of ethical science as 

 we now have it, greatly advanced and improved beyond 

 the state in which the ancient moralists had left it, and 

 as the modern inquirers took it up after the revival of 

 letters, Bishop Butler and Dr. Hutchinson. The former, 

 bred a Presbyterian, and exercised in the metaphysical 

 subtleties of the Oalvinistic school, had early turned his 

 acute and capacious mind to the more difficult questions 

 of morals, and having conformed to the Established Church, 

 he delivered, as preacher at the Rolls Chapel, to which 

 office he was promoted by Sir Joseph Jekyll, at the 

 suggestion of Dr. Samuel Clarke, a series of discourses, in 

 which the foundations of our moral sentiments and our 

 social as well as prudential duties were examined with 

 unrivalled sagacity. The latter having published his 

 speculations upon the moral sense, and the analogy of 

 our ideas of beauty and virtue, while a young teacher 

 among the Presbyterians in the north of Ireland, was 

 afterwards for many years Professor of Moral Philosophy 

 in the University of Glasgow, and there delivered his 

 Lectures, which, by their copious illustrations, their amiable 



