delighted, and cried out: “Sir, I was once in company with Smith, and we did not take to each other; but had I known that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I should have hugged him.” One cannot help wondering what would have been said if Boswell had repeated another of our author’s critical opinions, that Johnson was “of all writers ancient and modern the one who kept off the greatest distance from common sense.” The most valuable part of Adam Smith’s critical lectures has been preserved in an essay on the _Imitative Arts_, which I should judge from internal evidence to have been drafted at this time, but to have been revised and improved in later years. Considering that neither Burke’s essay on the _Sublime and Beautiful_ nor Lessing’s _Laocoon_ had then appeared, we cannot but admire the originality he displayed in analysing the different effects produced by sculpture, painting, music, and dancing, and in distinguishing the different pleasures that attend the various kinds and degrees of imitation. He works out with much ingenuity the theory of the _difficulté surmontée_ by which Voltaire accounted for the effect of verse and rhyme. Smith extends this principle to other arts, and seeks, always cleverly, often successfully, to show that much of our delight in art arises from our admiration for the artist’s skill in overcoming difficulties. He declares that a disparity between the imitating and the imitated object is the foundation of the beauty of imitation. The great masters of statuary and painting never produce their effects by deception. To prove this, he refers to the rather unpleasing effect produced by painted statues and by the reflections of a mirror. Photography would have supplied him with another illustration.