Andrew Millar was then at the head of the London publishers. He had shown some time before, when Hume’s History fell into his hands, that he knew how to push a good book, and on this occasion too the firm lived up to its reputation.
Early in April, Hume, who was in London, received some copies, and wrote to thank Smith “for the agreeable present.” Always zealous in the service of friendship and Scottish literature, he employed all the wiles of diplomacy to promote the success of the book. “Wedderburn and I,” he writes, “made presents of our copies to such of our acquaintances as we thought good judges and proper to spread the reputation of the book. I sent one to the Duke of Argyle, and Lord Lyttelton, Horace Walpole, Soame Jenyns, and Bourke, an English gentleman who wrote lately a very pretty treatise on the Sublime. Millar (the publisher) desired my permission to send one in your name to Dr. Warburton.” Hume had delayed writing till he could tell how the book had been received and “could prognosticate with some probability whether it should be finally damned to oblivion, or should be registered in the Temple of Immortality.” Though it has only been out for a few weeks, he thinks he can now foretell its fate. But instead of gratifying an author’s impatience, Hume pretends to have been interrupted by an impertinent visitor, and digresses upon vacancies in the Scottish Universities, upon a new edition of Ferguson’s Treatise on Refinement, on Wilkie’s Epigoniad, and Lord Kames’s Law Tracts. At last he seems to be coming to the point:—
“But to return to your book and its success in this town. I must tell you——
“A plague to interruptions!—I ordered myself to be denied, and yet here is one that has broken in upon me again.” The second visitor was a man of letters, and Hume goes off on a new scent. He advises Smith to read Helvetius’s new book De L’Esprit, and adds, “Voltaire has lately published a small work called Candide ou L’Optimisme. I shall give you a detail of it.”
At last the badinage comes to an end with a warning that popularity is no test of merit. A wise man should rather be disquieted than elated by the approbation of the multitude:—
“Supposing, therefore, that you have duly prepared yourself for the worst by all these reflections, I proceed to tell you the melancholy news that your book has been very unfortunate, for the public seem disposed to applaud it extremely. It was looked for by the foolish people with some impatience; and the mob of literati are beginning already to be very loud in its praises. Three bishops called yesterday at Millar’s shop in order to buy copies, and to ask questions about the author. The Bishop of Peterborough said he had passed the evening in a company where he heard it extolled above all books in the world. The Duke of Argyle is more decisive than he used to be in its favour. I suppose he either considers it as an exotic, or thinks the author will be very serviceable to him in the Glasgow elections. Lord Lyttelton says that Robertson and Smith and Bower are the glories of English literature. Oswald protests he does not know whether he has reaped more instruction or entertainment from it, but you may easily judge what reliance can be placed on his judgment. He has been engaged all his life in public business, and he never sees any faults in his friends. Millar exults and brags that two-thirds of the edition are already sold, and that he is now sure of success. You see what a son of the earth that is, to value books only by the profit they bring him. In that view, I believe, it may prove a very good book.
“Charles Townshend, who passes for the cleverest fellow in England, is so much taken with the performance, that he said to Oswald he would put the Duke of Buccleugh under the author’s care, and would make it worth his while to accept of that charge. As soon as I heard this, I called on him twice with a view of talking with him about the matter, and of convincing him of the propriety of sending that young gentleman to Glasgow, for I could not hope that he could offer you any terms which would tempt you to renounce your professorship; but I missed him. Mr. Townshend passes for being a little uncertain in his resolutions, so perhaps you need not build much on his sally.”
On this occasion, as will appear in a later chapter, Townshend proved true to his resolve and false to his reputation.
Burke, who afterwards became one of Smith’s most intimate friends, was at this time known for his philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). He was also a principal contributor to the Annual Register; and that publication, in its admirable account of books published during the year 1759, quotes a long passage from the Theory of Moral Sentiments, with a prefatory tribute from Burke’s pen, which might quench the thirst of the thirstiest author. Smith is praised for having struck out a new, and at the same time a perfectly natural, road of ethical speculation.
“The theory is in all its essential parts just, and founded on truth and nature. The author seeks for the foundation of the just, the fit, the proper, the decent, in our most common and most allowed passions; and making approbation and disapprobation the tests of virtue and vice, and shewing that those are founded on sympathy, he raises from this simple truth, one of the most beautiful fabrics of moral theory, that has perhaps ever appeared. The illustrations are numerous and happy, and shew the author to be a man of uncommon observation. His language is easy and spirited, and puts things before you in the fullest light; it is rather painting than writing.”
“Perhaps there is no ethical work since Cicero’s Offices,” wrote Sir James Mackintosh, “of which an abridgment enables the reader so inadequately to estimate the merit, as the Theory of Moral Sentiments. This is not chiefly owing to the beauty of diction, as in the case of Cicero, but to the variety of explanations of life and manners which embellish the book often more than they illuminate the theory.”