The story that he applied, along with Hume, for Adam Smith's chair at Glasgow seems apocryphal; though the _Dissertation on the Sublime and the Beautiful_ (1756) shows his singular fitness for the studies that Hutcheson had made the special possession of the Scottish school.

It was in Grub Street that he appears to have attained that amazing amount of varied yet profound knowledge which made him without equal in the House of Commons.

His earliest production was a _Vindication of Natural Society_ (1756), written in the manner of Lord Bolingbroke, and successful enough in its imitative satire not only to deceive its immediate public, but also to become the basis of Godwin's _Political Justice_.

After a vain attempt to serve in Ireland with "Single-Speech" Hamilton, he became the private secretary to Lord Rockingham, the leader of the one section of the Whig party to which an honorable record still remained.

That connection secured for him a seat in Parliament at the comparatively late age of thirty-six; and henceforward, until his death in 1797, he was among its leading members.