The Online Library of Liberty

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• Preface
• Key to Abbreviations and References
• Introduction
• 1.: The Manuscript
• 2.: The Lectures
• 3.: Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages
• 4.: Rhetoric and Literary Criticism
• 5.: System and Aesthetics
• Bibliographical Note
• Lectures On Rhetoric and Belles Lettres: Lecture 2D.
• Lecture 3D.: Of the Origin and Progress of Language 1
• Lecture 4tha
• Lecture 5. A
• Lecture 6.THA: Of What Is Called the Tropes and Figures of Speech. B
• Lecture. 7. A
• Lecture. 8. A
• Lecture. 9tha
• Lecture. 10tha
• Lecture. 11 a
• Lecture. 12.THA: Of Composition
• Lecture. 13 a
• | Lecture. 14 a
• Lecture 15tha
• Lecture. 16th. a
• Lecture XVII. A
• Lecture Xviii a
• Lecture. Xixth. a
• Lecture. XX.THA
• Lecture Xxist. a
• Lecture Xxiida
• Lecture Xxiiida
• Lecture Xxivtha
• Lecture XXV. A
• Lecture Xxvitha
• Lecture Xxvii a
• Lecture Xxviiitha
• Lecture Xxix a
• Lecture. Xxx a
• Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages,&c. &c.1
• Appendix 1 (see P. 32) the Bee, Or Literary Weekly Intelligencer, For Wednesday, May 11, 1791.
• Appendix 2 Table of Corresponding Passages

1.

The Manuscript

In The Scotsman newspaper of 1 and 2 November 1961 John M. Lothian, Reader (later titular Professor) in English in the University of Aberdeen announced his discovery and purchase, at the sale of an Aberdeenshire manor–house library in the late summer of 1958, of two volumes of manuscript ‘Notes of Dr. Smith’s Rhetorick Lectures’. They had been part of the remainder of a once extensive collection begun in the sixteenth century by William Forbes of Tolquhoun Castle, and in the late eighteenth century the property of the Forbes–Leith family of Whitehaugh, an estate brought to the Forbeses by the marriage of Anne Leith. In September 1963 Lothian published an edition of the notes as Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres Delivered in the University of Glasgow by Adam Smith, Reported by a Student in 1762–63 (Nelson).

Identification of the lecturer was easy. It had always been known that Smith gave lectures on rhetoric; his manuscript of these (Stewart, I. 17) was among those destroyed in the week before his death in obedience to the strict instructions he had given, first to Hume in 1773, then in 1787 to his literary executors Joseph Black and James Hutton. Lecture 3 of the discovered report is a shortened version of the essay on the First Formation of Languages published by Smith in 1761. Further, Lothian found later in the 1958 sale volumes 2–6 of manuscript notes of lectures on Jurisprudence, and though they bore no name they turned out to be a more elaborate version of the lectures by Smith reported in notes discovered in 1876 and published by Edwin Cannan in 1896. A search in Aberdeen junk–shops was rewarded, thanks to the extraordinary serendipity which Lothian’s friends always envied him, by the finding of the missing volume 1. These volumes have the same format and paper as the Rhetoric and the same hand as its main text.

When the Whitehaugh family acquired these manuscripts is not known. Absence of mention of them in three successive catalogues of the collection now in Aberdeen University Library has probably no significance; these are lists of printed books. No link between the Forbes–Leiths and the University of Glasgow has come to light. The most probable one is that at some point they engaged as a private tutor a youth who had been one of Adam Smith’s students and who knew that he would endear himself to his notably bookish employers by bringing them this otherwise unavailable work by a philosopher already enjoying an international reputation as the author of the Moral Sentiments. Such private tutorships were among the most usual first employments of products of the Scottish universities in the eighteenth century; and of Smith himself we learn from the obituary notice in the Gentleman’s Magazine of August 1790 (lx. 761) that ‘his friends wished to send him abroad as a travelling tutor’ when he came down from Oxford in 1746 after six years as Snell Exhibitioner at Balliol—though WN V. f. i 45 suggests that even after his happy travels with the young Duke of Buccleuch in 1764–66 he had doubts about the value of such posts. Still, both his successors in the Chair of Logic at Glasgow had held them. Of course the discovery of a Whitehaugh tutor among the graduates of, say, 1763–64 would not necessarily bring us nearer to identifying the note–taker, who may have been another student. Such notes circulated very widely at the time. Indeed, given the celebrity of this lecturer it is surprising that the Rhetoric should have turned up so far in only one version. The attempt to match the handwriting of the manuscript with a signature in the Matriculation Album of the relevant period has been thwarted by the depressing uniformity of these signatures; entrants were calligraphically on their best behaviour.

In the matter of provenance an interesting possibility is opened up by a letter from John Forbes–Leith to James Beattie, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Marischal College, Aberdeen in 1779 about his family’s library (JML xi, quoting Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland LXXII, 1938, 252). The Rhetoric is not mentioned, but its subjectmatter lay so much in Beattie’s field of interest that one is tempted to wonder whether he was in some way instrumental in acquiring the manuscript. A similar possibility is that Smith’s successor as Professor of Moral Philosophy in 1764, Thomas Reid, who maintained his contacts with friends in Aberdeen long after his move to Glasgow, may have obtained the notes and handed them on to Whitehaugh. Reid is known to have been anxious to see notes of his predecessor’s lectures: ‘I shall be much obliged to any of you Gentlemen or to any other, who can furnish me with Notes of his Prelections whether in Morals, Jurisprudence, Police, or in Rhetorick’—so he said in his Inaugural Lecture on 10 October 1764 as preserved in Birkwood MS 2131/4/II in Aberdeen University Library.

The manuscript of the Rhetoric, now Glasgow University Library MS Gen. 95. 1 and 2, is bound in half–calf (i.e. with leather tips) and marbled boards. In the top three of the six panels of the spine is incised blind in cursive: ‘Notes of Dr. Smith’s Rhetorick Lectures: Vol. 1st.’ and ‘. . . Vol. 2nd’. The pages are not numbered; the present edition supplies numbering in the margin. The gatherings, normally of four leaves each, have been numbered on the top left corner of each first page, apparently in the same (varying) ink as the text at that point. Volume 1 has 51 gatherings, of which the 14th is a bifolium, here given the page–numbers 52a, v.52a, 53b, v.53b, to indicate that it is an insertion. Volume 2 consists of gatherings 52–114; 94 has six leaves; and 74 has a bifolium of different paper stuck in loosely between the first and second leaves with no break in the continuity of the text, and a partially erased ‘My Dear Dory’ written vertically on the inner left page, i.e. ii. v. 90 under the note about Sancho Panca. The pages measure 195 × 118 mm, but gatherings 1–4 only 168 × 106 mm (of stouter paper than the rest), and 5–15 185 × 115 mm. The watermark is LVG accompanied by a crown of varying size and a loop below it, and in some of the gatherings GR under the crown. This is the L. V. Gerrevink paper commonly used throughout much of the eighteenth century. The chain lines are vertical in all gatherings. The first page of each of the earlier gatherings is much faded, as though having lain exposed for a time before the binding was done.

Three hands, here designated A, B, and C, can be distinguished. Hand C, using a dark ink, appears in only a few places in the earlier pages, and may be that of a later owner of the manuscript: sometimes merely touching up faded letters. An appreciation of the nature and authority of the notes depends on an understanding of the activities of scribes A and B, who (especially A) were responsible for transcribing them from the jottings made in class. The scribal habits, of which the textual apparatus will furnish the evidence, rule out the possibility that the pages we have were written while the students listened.

There is an apparent contradiction between two reports of Adam Smith’s attitude to note–taking. According to his student John Millar, later Professor of Law: ‘From the permission given to students of taking notes, many observations and opinions contained in these lectures (on rhetoric) have either been detailed in separate dissertations, or engrossed in general collections, which have since been given to the public’ (Stewart I. 17). The Gentleman’s Magazine obituary (lx. 762) records that ‘the Doctor was in general extremely jealous of the property of his lectures . . . and, fearful lest they should be transcribed and published, used often to repeat, when he saw any one taking notes, that “he hated scribblers”.’ The paradox is resolved if we remember the advice given by Thomas Reid, and by many a university teacher before and since, that those who write most in class understand least, ‘but those who write at home after carefull recollection, understand most, and write to the best Purpose’, and that this reflective reconstruction of what has been heard is precisely what a philosophical discourse requires (Birkwood MS 2131/8/III). The general success with which our scribes grasped the structure and tenor of Smith’s course, as well as much of the detail, exemplifies what Reid had in mind. Even the exasperated admissions of failure—‘I could almost say damn it’, ‘Not a word more can I remember’ (ii. 38, 44)—confirm the method by which they are working. In some cases the scribe begins his transcription with a heading which will recall the occasion as well as the matter, as when he notes that Smith delivered Lectures 21 and 24 ‘without Book’ or ‘sine Libro’; and he is careful to give Lecture 12, the hinge between the two halves of the course, the title ‘Of Composition’ because it begins the discussion of the various species of writing.

Our manuscript is the result of a continuous collaboration between two students intent on making the notes as full and accurate a record of Smith’s words as their combined resources can produce. The many slips and gaps which remain should not blind us to the great pains taken. Working from fairly full jottings, Scribe A writes the basic text on the recto pages (except, oddly, i. 18–68 when he uses the verso pages), and thereafter two kinds of revision take place. He corrects and expands the text, writing the revision above the line when only a word or two are involved. Unfortunately the additions of this kind are far too numerous to be specially signalized without overburdening the textual apparatus, and they have been silently incorporated in the text. In any case it is impossible to distinguish those added currente calamo from those added later, except of course where the interlined words replace a deletion (and these are always noted here). When the addition is too lengthy to be inserted between lines, Scribe A writes them on the facing page (i.e. a verso page, except at i. 18–68) at the appropriate point, and often keys them in with x or some other symbol. All such additions on the facing page are, in this edition, enclosed in brace brackets { }. Scribe A’s sources for his additional materials no doubt varied; some of it was certainly ‘recollected in tranquillity’ as Reid would have recommended; some of it such a tirelessly conscientious student would acquire by consultation with a fellow–student, or perhaps one of the sets of notes in circulation from a previous year. There is reason to think that some of the material had simply been inadvertently omitted at the first transcription.

The second revision, much less extensive but very useful, is Scribe B’s. Apart from a few corrections of A’s words, B makes two sorts of contribution. He fills in a good many of the blanks clearly left by A with this in view—alas, not enough, though he is obviously in many ways better informed than A. This comes out also in the sometimes substantial notes he writes on the verso page facing A’s text, with supplementary illustration and explanation of the points there treated. These are enclosed in { }, with a footnote assigning them to Hand B. They raise the same question of source as A’s notes. From the fact that B never himself deletes or alters what he has written and generally arranges his lines so as to end exactly within a certain space, e.g. opposite the end of a lecture (i. v. 116; ii. v. 18), we may deduce that he is working from a tidy original or fair copy: another set of notes? The order in which A and B wrote their inserted matter varied: at i. 46 A’s note is squeezed into space left by B’s, and similarly at ii. v. 30 and elsewhere: but normally B’s notes are clearly later than A’s, as at i. v. 146, and at ii. v. 101 B’s note is squeezed between two of A’s although the second of these was written (in different ink) later than the first.

There is a noticeable falling–off in verso–page notes from about Lecture 16 onwards: inexplicable, unless Scribe A was becoming more adept in transcription. Certainly the report of the last lecture is much the longest of them all, but Smith probably, like most lecturers, used more than the hour this time in order to finish his course. Scribe A relieved the tedium of transcription by occasional lightheartedness. There is the doodled caricature of a face (meant to resemble Smith’s?) ‘This is a picture of uncertainty’, at ii. 67: at ii. 166 ‘WFL’, i.e. ‘wait for laugh’, is inserted then deleted; at ii. 224 the habitual spelling ‘tho’ is for once expanded by the addition of ‘ugh’ below the line. Of special interest is the added note at i. 196 recording the witticism of ‘Mr Herbert’ about Adam Smith’s notorious absent–mindedness. The joke about Smith must have been made just after the lecture and the note added shortly after the transcription in this case.

Henry Herbert (1741–1811), later Baron Porchester and Earl of Carnarvon, was a gentleman–boarder in Smith’s house throughout the session 1762–3. On 22 February 1763 Smith wrote to Hume introducing him as ‘very well acquainted with your works’ and anxious to meet Hume in Edinburgh (Letter 70). Hume (71) found him ‘a very promising young man’, but refers to him on 13 September 1763 (75) as ‘that severe Critic, Mr Herbert’. There is a letter from Herbert to Smith (74) dated 11 September 1763.

To suggest that Herbert may have been the source of at least some of the additional notes would be an unwarranted use of Occam’s razor. No one enjoying this degree of familiarity with the lecturer and consulting him on the content of the lectures would have left so many blanks unfilled; and Smith would certainly not knowingly have helped to compile notes of his talks. It is also worth noting that the Rhetoric lectures, unlike those on Jurisprudence etc. (see LJ 14–15), were not followed by an ‘examination’ hour in which additional points might be picked up.

The well–marked scribal habits of Scribe A point to his having suffered from a defect of eyesight, some sort of stenopia or tunnelvision. He is prone to various forms of haplography, omission of a word or syllable which resembled its predecessor: ‘if I may so’ (say omitted), ‘coing’ (coining), ‘possed’ (possessed). He writes ‘on the hand’, adds r to the, and imagines he has written ‘other’. Angle brackets < > have been used for omissions here supplied. There are frequent repetitions of word or phrase; these have been enclosed in square brackets [ ]. There are innumerable instances of anticipation of words or phrases lying ahead: most of these have been corrected by the scribe when his eye returns to his original jottings. In one case he anticipates a phrase from the beginning of the following lecture (i. 116, 117), showing that on this occasion he had allowed a weekend to pass before transcribing Lectures 8 and 9—Friday and Monday, 3 and 6 December. He often tries to hold in his mind too long a passage, writing words that convey the sense and having to change them, when on going back to his jottings he finds the proper words. He starts to write ‘object’ and has to change it to ‘design’. Most of the many overwritten words in the manuscript are examples of this, and unfortunately it is seldom possible to decipher the original word; where it is, it has been noted. The scribe’s memory of the drift of Smith’s meaning no doubt played a part; but here as elsewhere he is eager to record the master’s ipsissima verba. He frequently reverses the order of words and phrases and restores the proper order by writing numbers above them.

The aim of the present edition has been to allow the reader to judge for himself the nature of the manuscript by presenting it as fully as print will allow; but in the interests of legibility several compromises have been made. Where the punctuation is erratic or accidental it has been normalized: e.g. commas separating subject from verb, ‘is’ from its complement, a conjunction from its clause, and the like. The original paragraphing has been retained where it clearly exists and is intended. Not all initial capitals have been retained. The scribe usually employs them for emphasis or to convey an impression of a technical or special use of a word; but in ‘Some’, ‘Same’, ‘Such’, ‘with Regard to’, ‘in Respect to’, ‘for my Part’, ‘for this Reason’, etc., the capital has been ignored. Frequently used abbreviations have been silently expanded: such are y^s (this), y^m (them), y^r (their), yⁿ (than), y^se (those), nëyr (neither), oy^r (other), Bröy^r (Brother), p̈t (part), ag̈st (against), figs (figures), dïs (divisions), nom̈ve (nominative), and others of similar type. It has not been possible to record the many changes of ink, pen, and style of writing (from copperplate to hurried), though these are no doubt indicative of the circumstances in which Scribe A was working. The misnumbering of Lecture 5 onwards has been corrected, and noted.

To sum up the textual notation used: