Formerly impossible grammar whiz

Many witty and clever responses to than in that in.   was foir  anselmo_b was first off the mark, but I think the prize ought to go to  dyvyd for his elegant one:  "I'd rather be seen naked than in that in public."

The original (Sis tells me) is from Adam Smith, and looks more puzzling in an 18th c. paragraph:

When we have read a book or poem so often that we can no longer find any amusement in reading it by ourselves, we can still take pleasure in reading it to a companion. To him it has all the graces of novelty; we enter into all the surprise and admiration which it naturally excites in him, but which it is no longer capable of exciting in us; we consider all the ideas which it presents rather in the light in which they appear to him, than in that in which they appear to us, and we are amused in sympathy with his amusement which thus enlivens our own. 
 
Of course we wouldn't  do that  now (my unnecessary hint was to be "18th c. prose") -- we'd repeat the noun:  "than in the light in which".  Latinate, I guess.