We cannot suppose, therefore, that we have any proper representation or reflection of Smith’s literary lectures in the lectures of Blair, but it would be quite possible still, if it were desired, to collect a not inadequate view of his literary opinions from incidental remarks contained in his writings or preserved by friends from recollections of his conversation.  Wordsworth, in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads, calls him “the worst critic, David Hume excepted, that Scotland, a soil to which this sort of weed seems natural, has produced,” and his judgments will certainly not be confirmed by the taste of the present time.  He preferred the classical to the romantic school.  He thought with Voltaire that Shakespeare had written good scenes but not a good play, and that though he had more dramatic genius than Dryden, Dryden was the greater poet.  He thought little of Milton’s minor poems, and less of the old ballads collected by Percy, but he had great admiration for Pope, believed Gray, if he had only written a little more, would have been the greatest poet in the English language, and thought Racine’s Phaedrus the finest tragedy extant in any language in the world.  His own great test of literary beauty was the principle he lays down in his Essay on the Imitative Arts, that the beauty is always in the proportion of the difficulty perceived to be overcome.

Smith seems at this early period of his life to have had dreams of some day figuring as a poet himself, and his extensive familiarity with the poets always struck Dugald Stewart as very remarkable in a man so conspicuous for the weight of his more solid attainments.  “In the English language,” says Stewart, “the variety of poetical passages which he was not only accustomed to refer to occasionally, but which he was able to repeat with correctness, appeared surprising even to those whose attention had never been attracted to more important acquisitions.”  The tradition of Smith’s early ambition to be a poet is only preserved in an allusion in Caleb Colton’s “Hypocrisy,” but it receives a certain support from a remark of Smith’s own in conversation with a young friend in his later years.  Colton’s allusion runs as follows:—­

    Unused am I the Muse’s path to tread,
    And curs’d with Adam’s unpoetic head,
    Who, though that pen he wielded in his hand
    Ordain’d the 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.