LIFE OF CHAPTER I. T is more difficult to write about a man of letters Ithan about my other kind of great man. The individuality of an author, to whatever extent he may live in the creations of his pen, is immensely less bound up, in the public imagination, with his deeds, than is that of a soldier or a statesman. If these deeds have fashioned our daily lives, they have done so in a manner usually far more subtle and less obvious in the former case than in the latter. The individuality of Adam Smith can hardly be said. to be bound up at all with his deeds. Even in Kirkcaldy and Edinburgh, the places of his birth and of his death, but little memorial of him has survived. We think of him, in the main, and we think of him rightly, as the bosom friend of David Hume. It is to be regretted, on nearly all scores, that the records of his life are so meagre. For he was a great writer, and an interesting man. He is not reputed to have played any part in the world's history of the kind which tempts those whose ambition it is to show that the private and inner lives |