figure: tall, stout, grand, and authoritative; but he stoops horribly; his back is quite round; his mouth is continually opening and shutting, as if he were chewing something; he has a singular method of twirling his fingers and twisting his hands; his vast body is in constant agitation, see-sawing backwards and forwards; his feet are never a moment quiet; and his whole great person looked often as if it were going to roll itself, quite voluntarily, from his chair to the floor.

"Since such is his appearance to a person so prejudiced in his favour as I am, how I must more than ever reverence his abilities, when I tell you that, upon asking my father why he had not prepared us for such uncouth, untoward strangeness, he laughed heartily, and said he had entirely forgotten that the same impression had been, at first, made upon himself, but had been lost even on the second interview

"How I long to see him again, to lose it, too!-for, knowing the value of what would come out when he spoke, he ceased to observe the defects that were out while he was silent.

"But you always charge me to write without reserve or reservation, and so I obey as usual. Else I should be ashamed to acknowledge having remarked such exterior blemishes in so exalted a character. His dress, considering the times, and that he had meant to put on all his best becomes, for he was engaged to dine with a very fine party at Mrs. Montagu's, was as much out of thể common road as his figure. He had a large, full, bushy wig, a snuff-colour coat, with gold buttons (or, peradventure, brass), but no ruffles to his doughty fists; and not, I suppose, to be taken for a Blue, though going to the Blue Queen, he had on very coarse black worsted stockings."*

They, however, who only saw this distinguished person once or twice in society, were apt to form a very erroneous estimate of his temper, which was not at all morose or sullen, but rather kindly and sociable. He loved relaxation; he enjoyed merriment; he even liked to indulge in sportive and playful pleasantry, when his animal spirits were gay-pleasantry, indeed, somewhat lumbering, but agreeable from its perfect heartiness. Nothing can be more droll than the scene of this kind of which Mr. Boswell has preserved the account, and into the humour of which he seems to have been incapable of entering. When some one was mentioned as having come to Mr. (afterwards Sir Wm.) Chambers, to draw his will, giving his estate to Sisters, Johnson objected, as it had not been gained by trade: "If it had,' said he, he might have left it to the dog Towser, and let him keep his own name.'" He then

* It is truly painful to say, what is the real truth, that so excellent a writer as this lady once was, should have ended by being the very worst, without any single exception, of all writers whose name ever survived themselves. Such vile passages as this are in every page of her late works, and are surpassed by others-" A sweetness of mental attraction that magnetized longer from infirmity and deterioration of intellect from decay of years." (ii., 44.) Such outrages are all but breaches of decorum.

6

went on “laughing immoderately at the testator as he kept calling him. I dare say,' said he, he thinks he has done a mighty thing; he won't wait till he gets home to his seat-he'll call up the landlord of the first inn on the road, and, after a suitable preface on mortality and the uncertainty of life, will tell him that he should not delay making his will; "and here, Sir," will he say, "is my will, which I have just made, with the assistance of one of the ablest lawyers in the kingdom," and he will read it to him, (laughing all the time.) He believes he has made this will; but he did not make it: you, Chambers, made it for him. I trust you have had more conscience than to make him say being of sound understanding'-ha! ha! ha! I hope he has left me a legacy. I'd have his will turned into verse, like a ballad.' Mr. Chambers,” says Boswell," didn't by any means relish this jocularity, upon a matter of which pars magna fuit, and seemed impatient till he got rid of us. Johnson couldn't stop his merriment, but continued in it all the way, till he got without the Temple gate; he then burst into such a fit of laughter, that he appeared to be almost in a convulsion, and, in order to support himself, laid hold of one of the posts on the side of the foot pavement, and sent forth peals so loud that in the silence of the night, his voice seemed to resound from Temple Bar to Fleet Ditch” (ii., 270).

His laugh is described as being peculiarly hearty, though like a good-humoured growl; and one drolly enough said, "he laughs like a rhinoceros." He was, when in good spirits, ever ready for idleness, and even frolic; and his friend has recorded an amusing anecdote of himself and Messrs. Beauclerk and Langton, once rousing him at three in the morning after dining in a tavern, when he cheerfully got up and said they must "make a day of it." So forth they sallied, played such pranks in Covent Garden Market as boys broke loose from school might indulge in, and ended by going down the river and dining at Greenwich.

His love of children may be added to the account of his good humour and his kindness. This has indeed been observed as often accompanying the melancholic temperament, as if their innocence and defencelessness were a relief and repose to the agitated mind. The same love of children was observed in Sir Isaac Newton, and it was an accompaniment of the case of which I have already given the outlines. Johnson also liked the society of persons younger than himself; and to the last had nothing of the severeness, querulousness, and discontent with the world, which the old are often seen to show. Indeed, at all times of his life, he liked to view things rather on their light side, at least in discussion; and he was a decided enemy to the principles of those who superciliously look down upon vulgar enjoyments, or ascetically condemn the innocent recreations of sense. Though he never at any period of his life, except during his intimacy with Savage, was intemperate (for his often drinking alone, as he said, "to get rid of himself," must be regarded only as a desperate remedy attempted for an incurable disease); yet he loved at all times to indulge in the pleasures of the table, and was exceedingly fond of good eating, even

while for some years he gave up the use of wine. It was a saying of his in discussing the merits of an entertainment at which he had been a guest, "Sir, it was not a dinner to ask a man to." With the breakfasts in Scotland, he expressed his entire satisfaction: and in his "Journey," he says, that if he could "transport himself by wish, he should, wherever he might be to dine, always breakfast in Scotland."

All these, however, are trifling matters; only made important by the extraordinary care taken to record every particular respecting his habits, as well as his more important qualities.

He was friendly and actively so, in the greatest degree; he was charitable beyond what even prudential considerations might justify; as firmly as he believed the Gospel, so constantly did he practise its divine maxim, "that it is more blessed to give than to receive." His sense of justice was strict and constant; his love of truth was steady and unbroken, in all matters as well little as great; nor did any man ever more peremptorily deny the existence of what are sometimes so incorrectly termed white lies; for he justly thought, that when a habit of being careless of the truth in trifling things once has been formed, it will become easily, nay, certainly, applicable to things of moment. His habitual piety, his sense of his own imperfections, his generally blameless conduct in the various relations of life, has been already sufficiently described, and has been illustrated in the preceding narrative. He was a good man, as he was a great man; and he had so firm a regard for virtue that he wisely set much greater store by his worth than by his fame.*

* The edition of Boswell, by my able and learned friend Mr. Croker, is a valuable accession to literature; and the well-known accuracy of that gentleman, gives importance to his labours. I have mentioned one instance of his having been misled by the narrative of Sir Walter Scott, from neither having attended to the dates.-Supra, p. 44.

Biog

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 Calvinistic 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 tone of feeling, their enlightened views of liberty and human improvement, and their persuasive eloquence, made a deeper impression than the more severe and dry compositions of Butler could ever create, and laid the foundation in Scotland of the modern ethical school. In this he restored and revised, rather than created a taste for moral and intellectual science, which had prevailed in the fifteenth and early in the sixteenth centuries, but which the prevalence of religious zeal and of political faction had for above two hundred years extinguished. He restored it, too, in a new, a purer, and a more rational form, adopting, as Butler did nearly at the same time, though certainly without any communication, or even knowledge of each other's speculations, the sound and consistent doctrine which rejects as a paradox, and indeed a very vulgar fallacy, the doctrine that all the motives of human conduct are directly resolvable into a regard for self-interest.* Nothing

* Hutchinson had taught his doctrines in Dublin some years before Butler's "Sermons" were published in 1726; and had even published his "Inquiry into Beauty and Virtue," for the second edition of that work appeared in the same year. The "Sermons" had indeed been preached at the Rolls, where he began to officiate as early as 1718; but nothing can be more unlikely than that any private intimation of their substance should have been conveyed to the young Presbyterian minister in Ireland. Indeed, his book was written soon after he settled at the

more deserving of the character of a demonstration can be cited than the argument in a single sentence, by which he overthrows the position, that we seek other men's happiness, because by so doing we gratify our own feelings. This presupposes, says he, that there is a pleasure to ourselves in seeking their happiness, else the motive, by the supposition, wholly fails. Therefore, there is a pleasure as independent of selfish gratification, as the thing pursued is necessarily something different from the being that pursues it.

These two great philosophers, then, may be reckoned the founders of the received and sound ethical system, to which Tucker, by his profound and original speculations, added much. Hartley and Bonnet, who were a few years later, only introduced a mixture of gross error in their preposterous attempts to explain the inscrutable union of the soul and the body, and to account for the phenomena of mind by the nature or affection of the nerves; while at a somewhat earlier date, Berkeley, an inquirer of a much higher order, had applied himself to psychological, and not to ethical studies.

As ethics in its extended sense comprehends both the duties and capacities, and the moral and intellectual qualities of individuals, and their relations to each other in society, so may it also extend to the interests and the regulation of society, that is, to the polity of states, in both its branches, both the structure and the functions of government, with a view to securing the happiness of the people. Hence it may include every thing that concerns the rights, as well as the duties of citizens, all that regards their good government, all the branches of jurisprudence, all the principles that govern the production and distribution of wealth, the employment and protection of labour, the progress of population, the defence of the state, the education of its inhabitants; in a word, political science, including, as one of its main branches, political economy. When, therefore, ethical speculations had made so great progress, it was natural that this important subject should also engage the attention of scientific men; and we find, accordingly, that in the early part of the eighteenth century the attention of the learned and, in some but in a moderate degree, of statesmen also, was directed to these inquiries. Some able works had touched in the preceding century upon the subjects of money and trade. Sound and useful ideas upon these were to be found scattered through the writings of Mr. Locke. But at a much earlier period," Mr. Min, both in 1621 and 1664, had combated successfully, as far as reasoning went, without any success in making converts, the old and mischievous, but natural fallacy, that the precious metals are the constituents of wealth. Soon after Min's second work, "The Increase of Foreign Trade," Sir Wm. Petty still further illustrated

academy, in 1716, which he taught near Dublin; for the Lord-Lieu. tenant, Lord Molesworth, who was appointed in that year, revised the manuscript of it. Butler and Hutchinson were contemporaries; one born 1692, the other 1694. Dr. Smith was born considerably later, in 1723; Mr. Hume, in 1711.