t, and reconcile it to your system.[113]

Burke, who was thus reported by Hume to have been so much taken with
the book, reviewed it most favourably in the _Annual Register_, and
not only recognised Smith's theory as a new and ingenious one, but
accepted it as being "in all its essential parts just and founded on
truth and nature." "The author," he says, "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 showing that these 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 show 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."[114]
One of the most interesting characteristics of the book, from a
biographical point of view, is that mentioned by this reviewer; it
certainly shows the author to have been a man of uncommon observation,
not only of his own mental states, but of the life and ways of men
about him; as Mackintosh remarks, the book has a high value for "the
variety of explanations of life and manners which embellish" it, apart
altogether from the thesis it is written to prove.[115]

Charles Townshend adhered to his purpose about Smith with much more
steadiness than Hume felt able to give him credit for. Townshend, it
need perhaps hardly be said, was the brilliant but flighty young
statesman to whom we owe the beginnings of our difficulties with
America. He was the colonial minister who first awoke the question of
"colonial rights," by depriving the colonists of the appointment of
their own judges, and he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer who
imposed the tea duty in 1767 which actually provoked the rebellion. "A
man," says Horace Walpole, "endowed with every great talent, who must
have been the greatest man of his age if he had only common sincerity,
common steadiness, and common sense." "In truth," said Burke, "he was
the delight and ornament of this house, and the charm of every private
society which he honoured with his presence. Perhaps there never arose
in this country nor in any other a man of a more pointed and finished
wit, and (when his passions were not concerned) of a more refined and
exquisite and penetrating j