The Theory of Moral Sentiments - Adam Smith [262]
6 gibbet: “a gallows; the post on which malefactors are hanged, or on which their carcasses are exposed” (Johnson).
7 Voltaire reported the last words of Calas differently in his History of Elisabeth Canning, and of Jean Calas (1762) but likewise emphasized his magnanimity and protestations of innocence. Smith’s account is likely less indebted to print sources than to conversations with Voltaire in 1765, and with those he met in Toulouse during his stay there from 1764-65.
8 See 1.3.1 (p. 55).
9 Throughout his life Racine was caught in a complex web of literary jealousy, with rival factions sponsoring competing versions of both his Iphigénie and Phèdre. Smith’s story is likely drawn from the extracted version of the memoirs of Racine’s life commonly prefaced to the first volume of eighteenth-century collections of Racine’s works.
10 Among examples of Voltaire’s vanity known to Smith would have been Voltaire’s angry reaction to Kames’s relatively innocuous criticism in Elements of Criticism 22.
11 The Dunciad, published in various successively expanded editions between 1728 and 1743, was a satirical assault on Whig literary and political circles.
12 Smith reiterates elsewhere his admiration for Gray (see Rhetoric 2.96 and the remark reported at Rhetoric, p. 230), who treats several characteristically Smithean themes, including the torments of ambition and envy (“Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton-College”), fellow-feeling and “sympathetic tears” (“Ode to Adversity” and “The Progress of Poesy,” 3.1), and the vanity of glory (“Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard”). Two of Gray’s odes (“Progress of Poesy” and “The Bard”) were parodied in 1760, but most reports emphasize that Gray remained unruffled; see, e.g., Johnson, Lives of the Poets, “Gray” 14-16.
13 Several eighteenth-century accounts of Newton’s genius emphasize his tranquility and indifference to fame in manners that anticipate Smith; see, e.g., Hume, History of England 71; and esp. Fontenelle’s éloge of Newton in the collection to which Smith refers three paragraphs down, which emphasizes that Newton had “not the least sentiment of vanity” and that his Principia “had not at first all the praise it merited.”
14 Smith refers here to the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” in which those here named were all principal figures. The dispute concerned the imitation of the classical style in seventeenth-century French literature and other arts, with the advocates of the superiority of the ancient literature—esp. Racine and Boileau-Despréaux—ranged against advocates of the moderns—esp. Perrault, Fontenelle, and La Motte. In his éloge to Boileau-Despréaux in the collection to which the end of the present paragraph alludes, d’Alembert details Boileau-Despréaux’s struggles with the above-named rivals.
15 Smith refers to the support of Addison’s “Buttonian” circle for a translation of the Iliad prepared by one of Addison’s protégés—a resentment that culminated in Pope’s attack on the cowardly deference of Addison’s circle in his “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” (1734).
16 Fontenelle comments on the simplicity of manners in several places in his éloges; some are helpfully detailed in Gregory Matthew Adkins in Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000).
17 See 7.2.4 (p. 360).
18 See Cicero, De officiis 1.71.
19 Genesis 1:26 -27; for commentary, see Otteson, chs. 1 and 6. A related idea is central to Stoicism; see, e.g., Epictetus, Discourses 2.8.9-23; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 12.26.
20 Respectively the courts of France and Great Britain.
21 Smith here translates a passage from Massillon’s Discours prononcé à une bénédiction des drapeaux du régiment de Catinat.
22 The quotation is from Voltaire’s La Pucelle d’Orléans, chant 5.
PART III, CHAPTER III
1 Smith engages with the theory of vision at greater length in his “Of the External Senses”; a helpful introduction