this proposition has escaped you, or rather is interwoven with your reasoning.  In that place you say expressly, “It is painful to go along with grief, and we always enter into it with reluctance.”  It will probably be requisite for you to modify or explain this sentiment, and reconcile it to your system.[113]

Burke, who was thus reported by Hume to have been so much taken with the book, reviewed it most favourably in the Annual Register, and not only recognised Smith’s theory as a new and ingenious one, but accepted it as being “in all its essential parts just and founded on truth and nature.”  “The author,” he says, “seeks for the foundation of the just, the fit, the proper, the decent, in our most common and most allowed passions, and making approbation and disapprobation the tests of virtue and vice, and showing that these are founded on sympathy, he raises from this simple truth one of the most beautiful fabrics of moral theory that has perhaps ever appeared.  The illustrations are numerous and happy, and show the author to be a man of uncommon observation.  His language is easy and spirited, and puts things before you in the fullest light; it is rather painting than writing."[114] One of the most interesting characteristics of the book, from a biographical point of view, is that mentioned by this reviewer; it certainly shows the author to have been a man of uncommon observation, not only of his own mental states, but of the life and ways of men about him; as Mackintosh remarks, the book has a high value for “the variety of explanations of life and manners which embellish” it, apart altogether from the thesis it is written to prove.[115]

Charles Townshend adhered to his purpose about Smith with much more steadiness than Hume felt able to give him credit for.  Townshend, it need perhaps hardly be said, was the brilliant but flighty young statesman to whom we owe the beginnings of our difficulties with America.  He was the colonial minister who first awoke the question of “colonial rights,” by depriving the colonists of the appointment of their own judges, and he was the Chancellor of the Exchequer who imposed the tea duty in 1767 which actually provoked the rebellion.  “A man,” says Horace Walpole, “endowed with every great talent, who must have been the greatest man of his age if he had only common sincerity, common steadiness, and common sense.”  “In truth,” said Burke, “he was the delight and ornament of this house, and the charm of every private society which he honoured with his presence.  Perhaps there never arose in this country nor in any other a man of a more pointed and finished wit, and (when his passions were not concerned) of a more refined and exquisite and penetrating judgment.”  He had in 1754 married the Countess of Dalkeith, daughter and co-heiress of the famous Duke of Argyle and Greenwich, and widow of the eldest son of the Duke of Buccleugh.  She had been left with two sons by her first husband, of whom the eldest had succeeded his grandfather as Duke of Buccleugh in 1751, and was now at Eton under the tutorship of Mr. Hallam, father of the historian.  On leaving Eton he was to travel abroad with a tutor for some time, and it was for this post of tutor to the Duke abroad that Townshend, after reading the Theory of Moral Sentiments, had set his heart on engaging its author.