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Title: Life of Adam Smith

Author: John Rae

Release Date: December 2, 2005 [EBook #17196]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Life of Adam Smith

By

JOHN RAE

London

MACMILLAN & CO.

AND NEW YORK

1895

PREFACE

The fullest account we possess of the life of Adam Smith is still the
memoir which Dugald Stewart read to the Royal Society of Edinburgh on
two evenings of the winter of 1793, and which he subsequently
published as a separate work, with many additional illustrative notes,
in 1810. Later biographers have made few, if any, fresh contributions
to the subject. But in the century that has elapsed since Stewart
wrote, many particulars about Smith and a number of his letters have
incidentally and by very scattered channels found their way into
print. It will be allowed to be generally desirable, in view of the
continued if not even increasing importance of Smith, to obtain as
complete a view of his career and work as it is still in our power to
recover; and it appeared not unlikely that some useful contribution to
this end might result if all those particulars and letters to which I
have alluded were collected together, and if they were supplemented by
such unpublished letters and information as it still remained possible
to procure. In this last part of my task I have been greatly assisted
by the Senatus of the University of Glasgow, who have most kindly
supplied me with an extract of every passage in the College records
bearing on Smith; by the Council of the Royal Society of Edinburgh,
who have granted me every facility for using the _Hume
Correspondence_, which is in their custody; and by the Senatus of the
University of Edinburgh for a similar courtesy with regard to the
_Carlyle Correspondence_ and the Da