Henry Home was a hardheaded but sensitive lawyer whose abilities and disciplined research took him to the top of his profession and made him for more than forty years a dominant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. He was regarded in his own time as an original thinker whose interests spanned the range of enlightened concerns and spilled over into nearly as broad a spectrum of improving activities. A patron and companion to David Hume, Adam Smith, William Robertson, John Millar, and others who made Edinburgh a leading center of European culture in the 1760s and 1770s, Home appeared to his contemporaries as their equal and in practical affairs as a far more important man. Today he still deserves attention as a founder of Scottish Common-Sense Philosophy, as an aesthetician and rhetorician, as one of the improvers who helped to transform Scotland's economy during the late eighteenth and early...