It is but seldom that a philosopher who has been occupied from his youth with moral or political inquiries succeeds completely to his wish in stating to others the grounds upon which his own opinions are founded; and hence it is that the known principles of an individual who has approved to the public his candor, his liberality, and his judgment, are entitled to a weight and an authority independent of the evidence which he is able, upon any particular occasion, to produce in their support. A secret consciousness of this circumstance, and an apprehension that by not doing justice to an important argument the progress of truth may be rather retarded than advanced, have probably induced many authors to withhold from the world the unfinished results of their most valuable labors, and to content themselves with giving the general sanction of their suffrages to truths which they regarded as peculiarly interesting to the human race. This finely balanced observation—kind, penetrating, lacking warmth, that it may appear more general, more forcible—was made apropos of Adam Smith. It appears from a letter to Hume that as early as 1773 Smith, who died in 1790, had determined that the bulk of the literary papers about him should never be published. And he would in after-life seem carefully to have separated, as he esteemed it worthy or not, whatever work he did. Among the papers destined to destruction one may guess—for though Smith, to the end a slow composer, had the habit of dictating to a secretary as he paced his room, the contents of his portfolios were not certainly known to any—were the lectures on rhetoric which he read at Edinburgh in 1748, and those on natural religion and jurisprudence which formed part of his course at Glasgow. But his anxiety to blot out the trace of even these, which he was too conscientious not at one time to have deemed sound, so increased as his last painful illness drew the threads of life out of his willing hand, that Dr. Hutton says he not only entreated the friends to whom he had entrusted the disposal of his MSS., to destroy them with some small specified exceptions, in the event of his death; but at the last could not rest satisfied till he learnt that the volumes were in ashes; and to that state, to his marked relief, they were accordingly reduced some few days before his death.