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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. 58.

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

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