work, and were
probably effects of the injury the author fancied himself to have
suffered. Anyhow they could not have been its causes, and the whole
story, so thoroughly opposed to the unusual tolerancy and benevolence
of Smith's character, merits no attention. It sprang manifestly from
some imaginary suspicion of a sensitive minor poet, but Mickle used to
denounce Smith without stint, and, thinking he had an opportunity for
retaliation when the letter to Strahan appeared, he wrote a satire
entitled, "An Heroic Epistle from Hume in the Shades to Dr. Adam
Smith," which he never published indeed, though he showed it about
among his friends, but in which, says Sim, who had seen it, Smith and
his noble pupil were rather roughly handled.[278] Mickle afterwards
burnt this _jeu d'esprit_, and very probably came to entertain better
views of Smith, for he seems to have been not only quick to suspect
injuries, but ready after a space to perceive his error. He once
inserted an angry note in one of his poems against Garrick, who had,
as he imagined, used him ill; but going afterwards to see the great
actor in _King Lear_, he listened to the first three acts without
saying a word, and after a fine passage in the fourth, heaved a deep
sigh, and turning to his companion said, "I wish that note was out of
my book." Had he foreseen the noise his several friends continued to
make, even after his death, about this purely imaginary offence on the
part of Adam Smith, the poet would not improbably wish the polemical
prefaces out of his book. Smith did not think much of Mickle's
translation of the _Lusiad_, holding the French version to be much
superior,[279] but if he happened to express this unfavourable opinion
to the Duke of Buccleugh, it could not have been with any thought of
injuring a struggling and meritorious young author. He has never shown
any such intolerance of public contradiction as Mickle's friends chose
to attribute to him. Dr. James Anderson, the first and true author of
what is known as Ricardo's theory of rent, won Smith's friendship by a
controversial pamphlet challenging some of his doctrines; Bentham
won--what is rarer--his conversion from the doctrines impugned, and a
very kindly letter still exists which Smith wrote to another hostile
critic, Governor Pownall, and which I shall give here, as it was one
of the first things he did after now arriving in London. Pownall had
been Governor of Massachusetts, a man of much a