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tage of the formula is, that it sets before us a definite aim, and affords us at any time a measure of the happiness we enjoy or of that we see around us. Judged by this standard, however, the conclusion must be-and it is a conclusion from which Adam Smith does not shrink-that the lot of a beggar may be equal in point of happiness to that of a king.

The result of this Epicurean theory of life on Adam Smith was, fortunately for the world, a strong preference for the life of learning and literature over the professional or political life. He abjured from the first all anxiety for the prizes held out by the various professions to candidates for wealth or reputation. Though sent to Balliol at seventeen as a Snell exhibitioner, for the purpose of fitting himself for service in the Church of England, he preferred so much the peace of his own mind to the wishes of his friends and relations, that, when he left Oxford after a residence of seven years, he declined to enter into the ecclesiastical profession at all, and he returned to Scotland with the sole and simple hope of obtaining through literature some post of moderate preferment more suitable to his inclinations.

Fortune seems to have favoured him in making such a course possible, for after leaving Oxford he spent two years at home with his mother at Kirkaldy. He had not to encounter the difficulties which compelled Hume to practise frugality abroad, in order to preserve his independence. His father, who had died a few months before his birth, had been private secretary to the Principal Secretary of State for Scotland, and after that Comptroller of the Customs at Kirkaldy. Adam Smith was, moreover, an only child, and if there was not wealth at home, there was the competence which was all he desired.

By the circumstances of his birth, his education, like that of David Hume, devolved in his early years upon his mother, of whom one would gladly know more than has been vouchsafed

by her son's biographer. She is said to have been blamed for spoiling him, but it is possible that what seemed to her Scotch neighbours excessive indulgence meant no very exceptional degree of kindness. At all events, the treatment succeeded, nor had ever a mother a more devoted son. Her death, which did not long precede his own, closed a life of unremitted affection on both sides, and was the first and greatest bereavement that Adam Smith ever had to mourn. The society of his mother and her niece, Miss Douglas, who lived with them, was all that he ever knew of family life; and when the small circle broke up, as it did at last speedily and with short intervals of survival for those who experienced the grief of the first separation, Adam Smith was well-advanced in years. He survived his mother only six years, his cousin about two; and he had passed sixty when the former died.

It is said, that after a disappointment in early life, Adam Smith gave up all thoughts of marriage; but if he thus failed of the happiest condition of life, it is equally true that he was spared the greatest sorrows of human existence, and a number of minor troubles and anxieties. The domestic economy was entirely conducted by his cousin, and to the philosopher is attributed with more than usual justice all that incapacity for the common details of life with which the popular conception always clothes a scholar. It is said. that even the fancy of a La Bruyère has scarcely imagined instances of a more striking absence of mind than might be actually quoted of him; and from boyhood upwards he had the habit of laughing and talking to himself which sometimes led casual observers to inferences not to his credit.

Dugald Stewart, whose somewhat meagre memoir on Adam Smith is the chief authority for all that is known of his life,

See, for some anecdotes of this kind, the Quarterly Review, vol. xxxvi. 200.

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describes him as "certainly not fitted for the general commerce of the world or for the business of active life," The subject of his studies rendered him "habitually inattentive to familiar objects and to common occurrences.' Even in

company, he was apt to be engrossed with his studies, and would seem, by the motion of his lips as well as by his looks and gestures, to be in all the fervour of composition. In conversation "he was scarcely ever known to start a topic himself," and if he did succeed in falling in with the common dialogue of conversation, "he was somewhat apt to convey his own ideas in the form of a lecture." Notwithstanding these defects, we are told of "the splendour of his conversation," and of the inexhaustible novelty and variety which belonged to it, by reason of his ready adaptation of fanciful theories to all the common topics of discourse.

Of his early years-often the most interesting of any, as indicative of future character-singularly little remains known. Some of those who were the companions of his first school years at Kirkaldy, and who remained his friends for life, have attested the passion he even then had for books and "the extraordinary powers of his memory.'

At the age of fourteen he was sent to the University of Glasgow, where his favourite studies were mathematics and natural sciences, and where he attended the lectures of Dr. Hutcheson, who has been called "the father of speculative philosophy in Scotland in modern times," and whose theory of the Moral Sense had so much influence on Adam Smith's own later ethical speculations.

Beyond this reference to his studies, nothing is told of Adam Smith's three years at Glasgow. His whole youth is in fact a blank for his biographer. We hear of no prizes, no distinctions, no friendships, no adventures, no eccentricities of

any kind. Nor is it much better with regard to his career at Oxford, to which he was sent by the University of Glasgow at the age of seventeen. Only one anecdote remains, of very doubtful truth, and not mentioned by Dugald Stewart, to the effect that he once incurred rebuke from the college authorities of Balliol for having been detected in his rooms reading Hume's Treatise on Human Nature. The story is worth mentioning, if only as an indication of the prevalent idea of Adam Smith's bent of mind in his undergraduate days; and those who, in spite of experience, still hold to the theory, that at the bottom of every story some truth must lie, may gather from this one, that even at college the future friend of the historian was attracted by the bold scepticism which distinguished his philosophy.

It was perhaps by reason of this attraction that at the end of seven years at Oxford Adam Smith declined to take orders. Leaving Oxford, which for most men means an entire change of life, meant for him simply a change in the scene of his studies; a transfer of them from one place to another. Languages, literature, and history, could, he found, be studied as well at Kirkaldy as at the chief seat of learning in England. To Oxford, so different in most colleges now from what it was in those days, he seems never to have expressed or felt the gratitude which through life attached him to Glasgow; and his impressions of the English university have been immortalized by him in no flattering terms in what he has said of it in his Wealth of Nations.

After nearly two years spent at home, Adam Smith removed to Edinburgh, where, under the patronage of Lord Kames, so well known in connexion with the Scotch literature of the last century, he delivered lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres; and the same subject formed the greater part of his lectures as Professor of Logic at Glasgow, to which post he was elected

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in 1751, at the age of twenty-eight. The next year he was chosen Professor of Moral Philosophy at the same university; and the period of thirteen years, during which he held this situation, he ever regarded as the most useful and happy of his life.

Of his lectures at Glasgow only so much has been preserved as he published in the Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations respectively. He divided his course into four parts, the first relating to Natural Theology, the second to Ethics, the third to the subject of Justice and the growth of Jurisprudence, the fourth to Politics. Under the latter head he dealt with the political institutions relating to commerce and all the subjects which enter into his maturer work on the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations; whilst under the second head, le expounded the doctrines which he afterwards published in the Moral Sentiments. On the subject of Justice, it was his intention to write a system of natural jurisprudence, " or a theory of the general principles which ought to run through and be the foundation of the laws of all nations." It was to have been an improvement on the work of Grotius on the same subject, and the Theory of Moral Sentiments concludes with a promise which, unfortunately, was never fulfilled. "I shall," he says, "in another discourse, endeavour to give an account of the general principles of law and government, and of the different revolutions they have undergone in the different ages and periods of society, not only in what concerns justice, but in what concerns police, revenue, and arms, and whatever else is the object of law. I shall not, therefore, at present, enter into any further details concerning the history of jurisprudence.3

One of Adam Smith's own pupils, and afterwards for life one of his most intimate friends, Dr. Millar, professor of law To this hope he still clung even in the sixth edition of his work, published the year of his death, 1790.

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