left behind. To borrow even a hat to any
purpose, the two heads must be something of a size.

We cannot suppose, therefore, that we have any proper representation
or reflection of Smith's literary lectures in the lectures of Blair,
but it would be quite possible still, if it were desired, to collect a
not inadequate view of his literary opinions from incidental remarks
contained in his writings or preserved by friends from recollections
of his conversation. Wordsworth, in the preface to the _Lyrical
Ballads_, calls him "the worst critic, David Hume excepted, that
Scotland, a soil to which this sort of weed seems natural, has
produced," and his judgments will certainly not be confirmed by the
taste of the present time. He preferred the classical to the romantic
school. He thought with Voltaire that Shakespeare had written good
scenes but not a good play, and that though he had more dramatic
genius than Dryden, Dryden was the greater poet. He thought little of
Milton's minor poems, and less of the old ballads collected by Percy,
but he had great admiration for Pope, believed Gray, if he had only
written a little more, would have been the greatest poet in the
English language, and thought Racine's _Phaedrus_ the finest tragedy
extant in any language in the world. His own great test of literary
beauty was the principle he lays down in his Essay on the Imitative
Arts, that the beauty is always in the proportion of the difficulty
perceived to be overcome.

Smith seems at this early period of his life to have had dreams of
some day figuring as a poet himself, and his extensive familiarity
with the poets always struck Dugald Stewart as very remarkable in a
man so conspicuous for the weight of his more solid attainments. "In
the English language," says Stewart, "the variety of poetical passages
which he was not only accustomed to refer to occasionally, but which
he was able to repeat with correctness, appeared surprising even to
those whose attention had never been attracted to more important
acquisitions." The tradition of Smith's early ambition to be a poet is
only preserved in an allusion in Caleb Colton's "Hypocrisy," but it
receives a certain support from a remark of Smith's own in
conversation with a young friend in his later years. Colton's allusion
runs as follows:--

Unused am I the Muse's path to tread,
And curs'd with Adam's unpoetic head,
Who, though that pen he wielded in his hand
Ordain'd the