The fame of Adam Smith rests so deservedly on his great work, the Wealth of Nations, that the fact is apt to be lost sight of, that long before he distinguished himself as a political economist he had gained a reputation, not confined to his own country, by his speculations in moral philosophy. The Theory of Moral Sentiments was first published in 1759, when its author was thirty-six; the Wealth of Nations in 1776, when he was fifty-three.
The success of the latter soon eclipsed that of his first work, but the wide celebrity which soon attended the former is attested by the fact of. the sort of competition that ensued for translating it into French.

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