It may here be said that, though judged by modern standards of criticism Smith’s taste was faulty, yet all his favourite authors are in the first rank, and there is no instance recorded of his having bestowed praise on anything bad either in prose or poetry. “You will learn more as to poetry,” he once said, “by reading one good poem than by a thousand volumes of criticism.” Wordsworth in one of his prefaces calls him most unjustly “the worst critic, David Hume excepted, that Scotland, a soil to which this sort of weed seems natural, has produced.” The Lake Poet, who did not distinguish between the quality of the “Ode on the Intimations” and “Peter Bell,” was probably thinking of some literary anecdotes that appeared in _The Bee_ in 1791 after Smith’s death. The writer, who may or may not be trustworthy, is only repeating table talk. He mentions that Smith depreciated Percy’s _Reliques_ and some of Milton’s minor poems. With regard to blank verse, Smith said: “they do well to call it blank, for blank it is. I myself, even I, who never could find a single rhyme in my life, could make blank verse as fast as I could speak.” From this censure he always excepted Milton; but he thought the English dramatists should have used rhyme like the French. Racine’s _Phèdre_ appealed to him as the finest of all tragedies. Voltaire was his literary pope. Oddly enough, his first publisher’s commission was to collect and edit (anonymously, of course) for the Foulis Press an edition of the poems of a well-known Jacobite, Hamilton of Bangour. The book was published in 1748, and contained the “Braes of Yarrow,” which Wordsworth called an exquisite ballad. Hamilton had played poet laureate to the Young Pretender in 1745, and was still an exile in France. In 1750, when the poet was pardoned, he struck up a warm friendship with his anonymous editor, and (according to Sir John Dalrymple) Smith spent with him “many happy and flattering hours.” It has been said that in addition to his lectures on English literature Smith also delivered a course on Economics. This we know from a manuscript by which Dugald Stewart vindicates Adam Smith’s claim to have been the original discoverer of the leading principles of political economy. This manuscript, a paper read by Smith to a learned society some years later, proves that he wrote, or rather dictated, his economic lectures in 1749, and delivered them in the following winter.