sentence or two may
be quoted from his comparison between French and English literature,
because they show that he was not, as he is sometimes accused of
being, an unfair depreciator of the great writers of England and a
blind admirer of those of France. He will be owned to have had a very
just opinion of the specific merits of each.

"Imagination, genius, and invention," he says, "seem to be the talents
of the English; taste, judgment, propriety, and order, of the French.
In the old English poets, in Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, there
often appears, amidst some irregularities and extravagancies, a
strength of imagination so vast, so gigantic and supernatural, as
astonishes and confounds the reader into that admiration of their
genius which makes him despise as mean and insignificant all criticism
upon the inequalities of their writings. In the eminent French writers
such sallies of genius are more rarely to be met with, but instead of
them a just arrangement, an exact propriety and decorum, joined to an
equal and studied elegance of sentiment and diction, which, as it
never strikes the heart like those violent and momentary flashes of
imagination, so it never revolts the judgment by anything that is
absurd or unnatural, nor ever wearies the attention by any gross
inequality in the style or want of connection in the method, but
entertains the mind with a regular succession of agreeable,
interesting, and connected objects."

From poetry he passes to philosophy, and finds that the French
encyclopedists had left their native Cartesian system for the English
system of Bacon and Newton, and were proving more effective expositors
of that system than the English themselves. After reviewing the
_Encyclopedie_ at considerable length, he gives an account of the
recent scientific works of Buffon and Reaumur, and, among books in
metaphysics, of Rousseau's famous _Discourse on the Origin and
Foundation of the Inequality of Mankind_, which was then only a few
months out, and in which, Smith says, Rousseau, "by the help of his
style, together with a little philosophical chemistry," has made "the
principles and ideas of the profligate Mandeville seem to have all the
purity and simplicity of the morals of Plato, and to be only the true
spirit of a republican carried a little too far." He gives a summary
of the book, translates a few specimen passages, and concludes by
saying, "I shall only add that the dedication to the Republic