SAMPSON LOW, MARSTON, SEARLE, & RIVINGTON- CROWN BUILDINGS, 188, FLEET STREET 1881 [All rights reserved] ADAM SMITH. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH. THE fame of Adam Smith rests so deservedly on his great work, the Wealth of Nations, that the fact is apt to be lost sight of, that long before he distinguished himself as a political economist he had gained a reputation, not confined to his own country, by his speculations in moral philosophy. The Theory of Moral Sentiments was first published in 1759, when its author was thirty-six; the Wealth of Nations in 1776, when he was fifty-three. The success of the latter soon eclipsed that of his first work, but the wide celebrity which soon attended the former is attested by the fact of the sort of competition that ensued for translating it into French. Rochefoucauld, grandson of the famous author of the Maxims, got so far in a translation of it as the end of the first Part, when a complete translation by the Abbé Blavet compelled him to renounce the continuance of his work. The Abbé Morellet-so conspicuous a figure in the French literature of that period-speaks of himself in his Memoirs as having been impressed by Adam Smith's Theory with a great idea of its author's wisdom and depth of thought.1 1 Mémoires, i. 244. "Sa Théorie des Sentimens Moraux m'avait donné une grande idée de sa sagacité et de sa profondeur." Yet, according to Grimm, it had no success in Paris. Corresp., iv. 291. B |