Adam Smith’s first published writing was an unsigned preface to Poems on Several Occasions (Glasgow: Printed and sold by Robert and Andrew Foulis, M.D.CC.XLVIII), a small octavo volume http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Smith0232/GlasgowEdition/PhilosophicalSubjects...
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of work by the Jacobite poet William Hamilton, later laird of Bangour, who had gone into exile in France after the defeat of his cause at Culloden in April 1746. The authorship of the preface is attested by a statement from the poet’s intimate friend Andrew Lumisden to George Chalmers, preserved in the Chalmers–Laing manuscript notes on Scots poets in Edinburgh University 1
Library. There is no evidence that Smith helped to edit the poems, but it seems unlikely that he was called in merely to write a short foreword. His enlistment was probably due to Henry Home (later Lord Kames), at whose instance he had just begun delivering his first course of lectures on rhetoric and belles–lettres at Edinburgh and who had been the poet’s literary mentor since the early 1720s.
The advertisement of the book in the Glasgow Courant for 23 January 1749 suggests that the date on the title–page was premature. A second issue, with preliminary pages reset, appeared in 1749, and a reprint with some corrections and bearing the poet’s name in 1758—the ‘Second Edition’. Hamilton had died in 1754; and in 1755 William Crawford, the ‘friend’ mentioned in the preface, to whom Hamilton had long been in the habit of entrusting his poems and whose granddaughter Elizabeth Dalrymple became Hamilton’s second wife in July 1752, also died. When the second edition of the poems was being prepared the poet’s brother–in–law (Sir) John Dalrymple wrote from Edinburgh, on 1 December 1757, to Robert Foulis:
I have changed my mind about the Dedication to Mr Hamilton’s Poems. I would have had it stand ‘the friend of William Hamilton’, but I assent to your opinion to have something more to express Mr. Crawfurd’s Character. I know none so able to do this as my friend Mr. Smith; I beg it therefore earnestly that he will write the Inscription and with all the elegance and all the feelingness which he, above the rest of mankind, is able to express. This is a thing that touches me very nearly, and therefore I beg a particular answer as to what he says to it. The many happy and the many flattering hours which he has spent with Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Crawfurd makes me think that he will account his usual indolence a crime upon this occasion. I beg you will make my excuse for not wryting him this night about this. I consider wryting to you upon this 2
head to be wryting to him.
The close network of friendships involved makes it unthinkable that Adam Smith could have refused this request, and the 1758 Dedication is here included as his. Neither it nor the Preface was reprinted in the much fuller collection of Hamilton’s poems—containing more than twice the number in the 1748 volume—published in Edinburgh in 1760; but the foreword to this, by David Rae (later Lord Eskgrove) echoes some of Smith’s phrases.
Hamilton’s poems appeared in various miscellanies from 1724 onwards and twenty–two of the 1748 thirty–nine had already been published. The long poem Contemplation; or, The triumph of love, finished in 1739, was issued in Edinburgh in February 1747 as a fourpenny pamphlet, abridged and (it seems) pirated; only the 1760 version is complete. Of it the most perceptive appreciation came from another Glasgow professor, William Richardson of the Chair of Humanity, in The Lounger No. 42, 19 November 1785. As Smith hints, Hamilton excelled particularly in the
‘imitation’ and free translation or adaptation of originals as diverse as Pindar, Anacreon, Sophocles, Virgil, Horace (Odes and Epistles), Shakespeare, Racine. He was the first to render Homer into English blank verse: the Glaucus and Diomed episode from Iliad, vi. His best–known poem is the imitation–ballad The Braes of Yarrow, which in turn inspired imitations by http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Smith0232/GlasgowEdition/PhilosophicalSubjects...
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Wordsworth.
Text reproduced: Preface, from Poems 1748 and 1758, p.v (1749 has six spelling variants); Dedication, from Poems 1758, pp.iii–iv.
PREFACE TO WILLIAM HAMILTON’S POEMS ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS (1748) No writings of this kind ever had a better claim to the indulgence of the public, than the following poems; as this collection is published not only without the author’s consent, but without his knowledge, and therefore in justice to him, the editors must take upon themselves any faults or imperfections that may be found in it.
It is hoped, that the many beauties of language and sentiment which appear in this little volume, and the fine genius the author every where discovers, will make it acceptable to every reader of taste, and will in some measure attone for our presumption in presenting the publick with poems, of which none have had the author’s finishing hand, and many of them only first essays in his early youth.
One inducement to print them, was to draw from the author a more perfect edition, when he returns to this country, and if our faulty attempt shall be the occasion of producing a work that may be an honour to this part of the kingdom, we shall glory in what we have done.
What brought us at first to think of this little undertaking was the concern some of the author’s friends express’d to us, at the imperfect edition of his noble poem of CONTEMPLATION lately published from an incorrect manuscript; this determin’d us to give an edition of it, less unworthy of the author, and to join to it every little piece of his that had been printed at different times; and we prevailed likewise on a friend of his, tho’ with some difficulty, to give us a small number of pieces that had never before been printed, some of which had been handed about in manuscript, and might have been printed with the transcribers errors by others. It is owing to the delicacy of this friend of the author’s, that this edition is not enriched with many original poems, and some beautiful translations from Pindar and other ancient poets, both Greek and Roman, that are in his possession, but which he would not permit to be published.
Glasgow, December 21. 1748.
DEDICATION TO WILLIAM HAMILTON’S POEMS ON SEVERAL OCCASIONS (1758) TO THE MEMORY OF MR. WILLIAM CRAUFURD, MERCHANT IN GLASGOW, THE FRIEND OF MR.
HAMILTON,
WHO to that exact frugality, that downright probity and plainness of manners so suitable to his profession, joined a love of learning and of all the ingenious arts, an openness of hand and a generosity of heart that was free both from vanity and from weakness, and a magnanimity that could support, under the prospect of approaching and unavoidable death, the most torturing pains of body with an unalterable chearfulness of temper, and without once interrupting, even to his last hour, the most manly and the most vigorous activity in a vast variety of business; http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/LFBooks/Smith0232/GlasgowEdition/PhilosophicalSubjects...
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This Edition of the Works of a Gentleman for whom he, who was candid and
penetrating, circumspect and sincere, always expressed the highest and the most affectionate esteem, is inscribed by the Editors, as the only monument which it is in their power to raise of their veneration and of their regret.
ENDNOTES
[1 ] Laing MSS., 359: quoted by Nelson S. Bushnell, William Hamilton of Bangour, Jacobite and Poet (1957), 132, n. 17.
[2 ] W. J. Duncan, Notices and Documents illustrative of the Literary History of Glasgow (Maitland Club: Glasgow, 1831), 23–4, taken from the Foulis Press papers.
DUGALD STEWART: ACCOUNT OF THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF ADAM
SMITH, LL.D.