"A third example [of unfortunate failure to check whether a passage was written for 1759 or 1790] is a lapse in a perceptive interpretation of the Moral Sentiments by Professor Charles L. Griswold, bringing out the influence of drama in Smith’s book [Charles L. Griswold, Jr., Adam Smith and the Virtues of Enlightenment (1999)]. He claims that, when Smith writes of the spectator’s moral judgement, he envisages the spectator of a dramatic performance seeing the agent as an ‘actor’ on the stage. The evidence that Griswold adduces is one instance of the word ‘actor’ in place of ‘agent’ in the Moral Sentiments and one instance in the Lectures on Rhetoric. The Moral Sentiments instance occurs in part VI of the book, which was added to the sixth edition of 1790; so Griswold’s evidence cannot apply to Smith’s general conception of the spectator. There was in fact an instance of the word ‘actor’ in the first edition which was replaced by ‘agent’ in subsequent editions, showing that there was clearly no association with actors on the stage. This flaw in Griswold, however, does not lessen the value of his interpretation as a whole."