The Impartial Spectator is rather a fickle and illogical person; he does not like unexampled prosperity, but he is always ready to sympathise with trivial joys. “It is quite otherwise with grief. Small vexations excite no sympathy, but deep affliction calls forth the greatest.” It takes a great grief to enlist our sympathy, for “it is painful to go along with grief, and we always enter it with reluctance.” So when we hear a tragedy we struggle against sympathetic sorrow as long as we can, and when we finally give way, carefully conceal our tears! In a letter of July the 28th, 1759, from which we have already quoted, Hume made some objections to this part of Smith’s theory:— “I am told that you are preparing a new edition, and propose to make some additions and alterations in order to obviate objections. I shall use the freedom to propose one; which, if it appears to be of any weight, you may have in your eye. I wish you had more particularly and fully proved that all kinds of sympathy are agreeable. This is the hinge of your system, and yet you only mention the matter cursorily on p. 20. Now it would appear that there is a disagreeable sympathy as well as an agreeable. And, indeed, as the sympathetic passion is a reflex image of the principal, it must partake of its qualities, and be painful when that is so.... “It is always thought a difficult problem to account for the pleasure from the tears and grief and sympathy of tragedy, which would not be the case if all sympathy was agreeable. An hospital would be a more entertaining place than a ball. I am afraid that on p. 99 and 111 this proposition has escaped you, or rather is interwoven with your reasoning. In that place you say expressly, ‘It is painful to go along with grief, and we always enter into it with reluctance.’ It will probably be requisite for you to modify or explain this sentiment, and reconcile it to your system.” In the following spring (April 4th) Smith wrote from Glasgow to Strahan, Millar’s young and very able partner, about the second edition, for which he had sent “a good many corrections and improvements.” He asks Strahan to take care that the book is printed “pretty exactly according to the copy I delivered to you.” Strahan, it seems, had offered his services as a critic, and Smith was a little afraid that he might find unauthorised alterations in the text. He will be much obliged to his publisher for suggestions, but cannot consent to surrender “the precious right of private judgment, for the sake of which your forefathers kicked out the Pope and the Pretender. I believe you to be much more infallible than the Pope, but as I am a Protestant, my conscience makes me scruple to submit to any unscriptural authority.” The second edition was issued soon afterwards. It has been erroneously described as a reprint of the first.[12]