Free On the Wealth of Nations by P.J. O'Rourke Page B

And it will take me more than that long to read it. A man's soul is understandable only to God, so the best that mortals can getout of such a purgatorial enterprise is an understanding of the Great Biography Subject's personality.
    'Personality' hadn't been invented in the eighteenth century. The Copernican view of the cosmos was accepted. The earth was no longer considered the center of the universe. But Romanticism's neo-Ptolemaic view of the cosmos hadn't come into fashion: the self had not yet taken the earth's place. The bundle of tics and traits and squirrelly notions that make one person different from another was not considered supremely important. Personality, in the 1700s, meant the fact of being a person rather than a thing. The solipsistic motormouth Ralph Waldo Emerson seems to have initiated the use of the word the way we use it.
    What an eighteenth-century man had was character. If he possessed any distinctive personal qualities at all, character was the one worth mentioning. As with much that's best in life, character is dull. 'Vice is always capricious: virtue only is regular and orderly,' Smith wrote in
Moral Sentiments
. 4 In Smith's opinion, the 'difference between a man of principle and honour and a worthless fellow' is that 'the one adheres, on all occasions, steadily and resolutely to his maxims, and preserves through the whole of his life one even tenour of conduct. The other, acts variously and accidentally, as humour, inclination, or interest chance to be uppermost.' 5
    Every modern person is a worthless fellow. It's no wonder that many of the most admirable – and unmodern – people of the eighteenth century do not 'come alive on the page' for usmoderns. Meanwhile some of the less admirable, like Rousseau, come alive so well that they still need killing off today. Richard Brookhiser coped with this problem of good character in his biography of George Washington,
Founding Father
:
    We worry about our authenticity – about whether our presentation reflects who we 'really' are. Eighteenth-century Americans attended more to the outside story and were less avid to drive putty knives between the outer and inner man. 'Character' … was a role one played until one became it; 'character' also meant how one's role was judged by others. It was both the performance and the reviews. Every man had a character to maintain; every man was a character actor. 6
    Adam Smith's role as the Fred Mertz in
I Love Political Economy
was as regular and orderly and dull as any proponent of his ideas and defender of his character could hope. Smith lived most of his adult life with his widowed mother, Margaret Douglas Smith, and his spinster cousin, Janet Douglas. They doted on him and he on them. 'And nothing could be added more.'
    Smith's comments on his mother, in a letter telling his friend and publisher William Strahan about her death at ninety, are not the stuff of twenty-first-century memoirs: 'a person who certainly loved me more than any other person ever did or ever will love me; and whom I certainly loved and respected more than I ever shall either love or respect any other person'. 7
    Only one domestic anecdote comes down to us, circa 1788, from Sir Walter Scott, who was then an Edinburgh University student. At tea time, said Scott, Smith gave Janet Douglas 'sore confusion, by neglecting utterly her invitation to be seated, and walked round and round … stopping ever and anon to steal a lump from the sugar basin, which the venerable spinster was at length constrained to place on her own knee, as the only method of securing it from his most uneconomical depredations'. 8 But Sir Walter Scott could make a story out of anything, and often did.
    David Douglas, the nine-year-old son of another Smith cousin, was taken into this household when Smith was a bachelor of fifty-five. Skateboards, television, and Xboxes not having been invented, Smith enjoyed this and spent his leisure giving David his lessons.