_Wealth of Nations_ to command;
Yet when on Helicon he dar'd to draw,
His draft return'd and unaccepted saw.
If thus like him we lay a rune in vain,
Like him we'll strive some humbler prize to gain.

Smith's own confession is contained in a report of some conversations
given in the _Bee_ for 1791. He was speaking about blank verse, to
which he always had a dislike, as we know from an interesting incident
mentioned by Boswell. Boswell, who attended Smith's lectures on
English literature at Glasgow College in 1759, told Johnson four years
after that Smith had pronounced a strong opinion in these lectures
against blank verse and in favour of rhyme--always, no doubt, on the
same principle that the greater the difficulty the greater the beauty.
This delighted the heart of Johnson, and he said, "Sir, I was once in
company with Smith, and we did not take to each other, but had I known
that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I should have
hugged him." Twenty years later Smith was again expressing to the
anonymous interviewer of the _Bee_ his unabated contempt for all blank
verse except Milton's, and he said that though he could never find a
single rhyme in his life, he could make blank verse as fast as he
could speak. "Blank verse," he said; "they do well to call it blank,
for blank it is. I myself even, who never could find a single rhyme in
my life, could make blank verse as fast as I could speak." The critic
would thus appear here again to have been the poet who has failed,
though in this case he had the sense to discover the failure without
tempting the judgment of the public.

Indeed he had already begun to discover his true vocation, for besides
his lectures on English literature, which he delivered for three
successive winters, he delivered at least one winter a course on
economics; and in this course, written in the year 1749, and delivered
in the year 1750-51, Smith advocated the doctrines of commercial
liberty on which he was nurtured by Hutcheson, and which he was
afterwards to do so much to advance. He states this fact himself in a
paper read before a learned society in Glasgow in 1755, which
afterwards fell into the hands of Dugald Stewart, and from which
Stewart extracts a passage or two, which I shall quote in a subsequent
chapter. They certainly contain a plain enough statement of the
doctrine of natural liberty; and Smith says that a great part of the
opinions contained in the pap