‘I know I meant just what you explain, but I did not explain my own meaning so well as you. You understand me as well as I do myself, but you express me better than I could express myself. Pray accept the sincerest acknowledgements’. Thus wrote the eighteenth–century English poet A. Pope in a letter to his future literary executor and editor, the theologian W. Warburton, thanking him for the publication of an exegetic defence of the Essay on Man.

The poet's remark bears a certain analogy with the compliment Adam Smith is reported to have once paid to William Pitt, the young prime minister who was by then supposedly ‘reforming the national finances with the Wealth of Nations in his hand’. One evening in 1787, having just dined with Pitt at the house of a common Scottish friend in London and learned from the prime minister himself how effusively he supported the views put forward in the Wealth of Nations, Smith observed to Henry Addington (another guest at the dinner–party): ‘What an extraordinary man Pitt is – he makes me understand my own ideas better than before’.

But although superficially resembling the poet's enthusiastic reply to the man who unlocked the true meaning of his work, Smith's aside on his first meeting with the younger Pitt is, to say the least, highly ambiguous.