Judging by most assessments of his work, from both his contemporaries and recent commentators, Henry Home, Lord Kames, was not a startlingly original thinker. Samuel Johnson qualified his praise for Kames's venture into literary theory, Elements of Criticism (1762): "I do not mean that he has taught us anything: but he has told us old things in a new way." Kames himself, in a rare moment of humility, admitted that he was "not fond of controversy." Yet in his lifetime he managed to stir up a surprising amount of it. His essays and treatises, on everything from Scottish legal history to enlightened agriculture, were read and often rebuked by some of the leading minds of the eighteenth century, including Voltaire, David Hume, and Jonathan Edwards. Recognition of Kames's work was even more striking in America: Elements of Criticism quickly became an established part of the curriculum at American colleges...