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On the night of 11 July 1790, a few days before his death, Adam Smith ordered his two literary executors, Joseph Black and James Hutton, to burn all of his manuscripts, with the exception of a handful of essays. Smith thus ensured that, barring these short pieces, no incomplete work would be posthumously added to the two monuments of his career, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and The Wealth of Nations (1776). It is generally assumed that the manuscripts destroyed that night were versions, or portions, of two major works, long projected by Smith, one a treatise on the ‘History of Law and Government’, and the other a study of ‘the different branches of Literature’. These are the ‘two … great works’ Smith described as ‘upon the anvil’ in his letter of 1 November 1785 to the Duc de la Rochefoucauld. Detailed student notes from Smith's lecture courses on jurisprudence and on literature and rhetoric later surfaced, collected as the Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and the Lectures on Jurisprudence, and give us some access to Smith's thought on these topics. However, the loss of these two long-planned works on literature and legal-political history is enormous.