CHAPTER VI. Glasgow and Its University

GLASGOW AND ITS UNIVERSITY

Mr. Rae’s diligent researches have disposed of the idea that Smith was one of those profound philosophers who are helpless in the practical affairs of life. It appears from the records of the Glasgow University, that during his thirteen years’ residence he did more college business than any other professor. He audited accounts, inspected drains and hedges, examined encroachments on college land, and served as college quæstor, or treasurer, with the management of the library funds, for the last six years of his professorship. He was Dean of Faculty from 1760 to 1762, when he was appointed Vice-Rector. As such, in the frequent absence of the Rector, he had to preside over all University meetings, including the Rector’s Court, which had judicial as well as administrative powers, and could even punish students by imprisonment in the college steeple. He went frequently to Edinburgh, and at least once to London, on college business; and altogether we may discredit the remark made by one of Smith’s Edinburgh neighbours and reported by Robert Chambers: “It is strange that a man who wrote so well on exchange and barter had to get a friend to buy his horse-corn for him.”

There is one picturesque incident in the history of Smith’s connection with the college. The imposition of octroi duties on food coming into the city was still the principal means of raising municipal revenue in Glasgow as in most other towns of Scotland. But the students of the University were so far exempt from the tribute that they were allowed at the beginning of each session to bring in with them as much oatmeal as would keep them till the end of it. In 1757 this ancient privilege was contested, and the students were obliged by the “tackman” of the meal market to pay duty on their meal. Smith and another professor were sent to the Provost to protest against this infraction of University privileges, and to demand repayment. At the next meeting of the Senate, “Mr. Smith reported that he had spoken to the Provost of Glasgow about the ladles, exacted by the town from students, for meal brought into the town for their own use, and that the Provost promised to cause what had been exacted to be returned, and that accordingly the money was offered by the town’s ladler to the students.”

The intellectual level of the professors and lecturers in the University of Glasgow was already high when Smith joined them, and the place was free from the monopolistic spirit which dulled and enervated the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. In 1752, a year after his arrival, Smith took part in founding what was called the Literary Society of Glasgow. Besides the professors a number of outsiders were admitted—David Hume, Sir John Dalrymple the historian, John Callander the antiquary, Robert Foulis the famous printer, and others. In one of the first papers read to this society (January 1753) Adam Smith reviewed Hume’s Essays on Commerce. He had no doubt read the essays in proof, as there is a letter from Hume in the previous September, asking him for criticisms towards a new edition he was then preparing of his Essays, Moral and Political, in which these new Commercial Essays were to be incorporated.

Another and more convivial club was presided over by Simson, the professor of Mathematics, whose genius and amiability had impressed Adam Smith from his student days. When Simson died in 1768 he had spent half a century in the college. He divided each day with precision between work, sleep, refection in the tavern at the gate, and a measured walk in the gardens. Every Friday evening his club supped in the tavern, and every Saturday the members walked out a mile to the neighbouring village of Anderston, and there feasted on the customary one-course dinner of chicken broth, with a tankard of claret followed by whist and punch. Ramsay of Ochtertyre says that Smith was a bad partner. If an idea came to him in the middle of the game he would renounce or neglect to call. After cards they would talk, or Simson, who was the soul of gaiety, would sing Greek odes to modern airs. A more distinguished circle than this of plain livers and high thinkers could hardly have been found in Europe. Besides the editor of Euclid it included the founders of political economy and modern chemistry, and the inventor of the steam engine. For Joseph Black and his young assistant, James Watt, sat round the same fireside with Simson and Adam Smith. To the conversation of the club, said Watt, “my mind owed its first bias towards such subjects [literature, philosophy, etc.], in which they were all my superiors, I never having attended college, and being then but a mechanic.” In 1756 young Watt had come from London to Glasgow, and being refused permission by the close corporation of hammermen to set up as a mechanic in the town, he was welcomed by the professors, who appointed him maker of mathematical instruments to the University, and gave him a workshop and saleroom within its precincts. It is easy to imagine the delight with which Smith joined in rescuing Watt from the tyranny of a close corporation. The workshop was one of his favourite resorts, and the two became fast friends. More than half a century afterwards, one of the first works which the “young” artist of eighty-three executed with his newly invented “sculpture machine” was a bust of Smith in ivory.

In another part of the college space had been found for Robert Foulis’s printing-office. Encouraged by Hutcheson, Foulis had begun his business in Glasgow just before Smith left for Oxford. His “immaculate” Horace, the famous duodecimo, appeared in 1744, the proof-sheets having been hung up in the college and a reward offered for the detection of any inaccuracy. Adam Smith was a subscriber for two sets of Hutcheson’s System of Moral Philosophy, two beautifully printed quarto volumes issued by the Foulis press in 1755. The type used by the press came from Alexander Wilson’s typefoundry at Camlachie. But in 1760 the college built an observatory, and with the aid of the Crown founded a new chair of Astronomy. Thereupon Wilson, being appointed to the chair, asked to be allowed to transfer his foundry to the college, and the authorities, on the motion of Adam Smith, resolved to build a foundry in the grounds. Thus during Smith’s residence there were set up within the precincts of the University Watt’s workshop, Foulis’s printing-press, Wilson’s observatory and foundry, and last but not least, Cullen’s laboratory, where Black his assistant discovered the existence of latent heat.

The professors even started a series of lectures on natural science to a class of working men. In 1761 Smith and others sought to establish a school for dancing, fencing, and riding. But this project failed; and in the following year Smith is found as an active opponent of a proposal started in the town for the erection of a permanent theatre. He presides at a meeting which resolves that the University should join forces with the magistracy against this innovation. Shortly after his departure the opposition dropped and the theatre was built. But it was burned down by a mob of zealots, and in the Wealth of Nations Smith not only lashes those “fanatical promoters of popular frenzies,” who have always made the theatre an object of their peculiar abhorrence, but demands that the State should give “entire liberty to all those who for their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, music, dancing, by all sorts of dramatic representations and exhibitions.” Such public diversions would easily dissipate “that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the nurse of popular superstition and enthusiasm,” and would, with the aid of science and philosophy, correct whatever was unsocial or disagreeably rigorous in the morals of the country. By then he had learned to admire the French theatre as well as the French dramatists. A true liberal, he was always open to new ideas, and this last stump of Scottish prejudice was rooted out by his continental tour.

In the fifties Smith and Black helped Foulis to start an institution called the Academy of Design, said to have been the first of its kind in Great Britain. The authorities of the University found rooms for the purpose in the college, and they may therefore claim to have been the fathers, not only of the University extension movement, but also of technical instruction. Painting, sculpture, and engraving were the principal arts taught in this Academy. Tassie and David Allan were among the students; and Lord Buchan, who boasted of walking “after the manner of the ancients in the porticoes of Glasgow with Smith and with Millar,” learned to etch in Foulis’s studio. A shop was started in Edinburgh for the sale of works of art produced in the Academy, and Sir John Dalrymple, writing to Foulis in 1757, begs him to take the advice of Mr. Smith and Dr. Black, who are the best judges of what will sell. He also advises Foulis to have a circular drafted showing the advantages of the Academy. “Mr. Smith is too busy or too indolent, but I flatter myself Dr. Black will be happy to make out this memorial for you.” He invites Foulis and Smith to visit him in the Christmas vacance.

There is no doubt, from the amount of business they laid on his shoulders, and their choice of him as “Præses” in 1762, that Smith’s colleagues had a high opinion of his practical abilities. His public spirit and loyalty to the University were unbounded. The warmest and most generous of friends, he was also one of those rare spirits, especially rare in the reign of George the Third, who never let private interests turn the scale against the common good. He made three protests against a professor exercising the legal right of voting for himself in an election to an office of profit. When Rouet, the professor of History, asked for leave of absence, so that he might travel abroad as Lord Hope’s tutor without relinquishing his professorship, Smith voted with a majority for refusing the leave, and on a later occasion for depriving him of office. This led to a quarrel with the Lord Rector, but the pressure of college opinion eventually forced Rouet to resign. We shall see that Smith on a similar occasion was careful to practise as he had preached.

From this reformed and progressive University the economist often issued forth to breathe the eager air of a thriving mart. The town was remarkably free from poverty and crime. In his lectures he said that in Glasgow there was less crime than in Edinburgh, because it had more commerce and independence, fewer servants and retainers. When he first went to Glasgow as a student it was still poor; when he returned as a professor, its commercial prosperity had fairly begun. Its loyalty to the Hanoverian dynasty had cost it heavily in 1745, but that loyalty is intelligible enough; for the Act of Union which deprived Edinburgh of its Parliament, and of much of its resident aristocracy, opened up the colonial markets to Glasgow, and enabled its enterprising merchants to participate in the profitable monopoly of the American trade. By the middle of the century it was already the emporium for colonial tobacco. A tannery employed several hundred men; linen, copper, tin, and pottery became staple manufactures in the forties; carpets, crape, and silk in the fifties. Gibson, in his history of the town, tells us that after 1750 (when the first Glasgow Bank was opened) “not a beggar was to be seen in the streets.” When he adds that “the very children were busy,” we think of the early history of factories and shudder. “I have heard it asserted,” says Smith in the Wealth of Nations (Book II. chap. ii.), “that the trade of the city of Glasgow doubled in about fifteen years after the first erection of the banks there, and that the trade of Scotland has more than quadrupled since the first erection of the two public banks at Edinburgh.” He will not vouch for the figures, and holds such an effect “too great to be accounted for by the sole operation of this cause,” but says it cannot be doubted that the trade of Scotland did increase very considerably during the period, and that the banks contributed a good deal to this increase.

All these external marks of enterprise and progress indicated the truth of another of Smith’s sayings, that a few spirited merchants are a much better thing for a town than the residence of a court. According to Sir John Dalrymple, the three leading merchants of that time were together worth a quarter of a million of money. Measured by modern standards these are petty figures; but Mr. Rae says that commercial men in Glasgow still look back to John Glassford and Andrew Cochrane as perhaps the greatest merchants the Clyde had ever seen. Cochrane, who was Provost when the Young Pretender paid his unwelcome visit, founded a weekly club, the express design of which, according to Dr. Carlyle, was to inquire into the nature and principles of trade. Smith, who joined the club, became intimate with Cochrane, and afterwards, in Dr. Carlyle’s words, “acknowledged his obligations to this gentleman’s information when he was collecting materials for his Wealth of Nations.” The junior merchants, adds the Doctor, who flourished after Cochrane, “confess with respectful remembrance that it was Andrew Cochrane who first opened and enlarged their views.” In Humphrey Clinker he is described as “one of the first sages of the Scottish Kingdom.”

Dugald Stewart, who drew his information from James Ritchie, an eminent merchant of Glasgow, tells us that Smith’s intimacy with its most respected inhabitants gave him the commercial information he needed; and he adds: “It is a circumstance no less honourable to their liberality than to his talents, that notwithstanding the reluctance so common among men of business to listen to the conclusions of mere speculation and the direct opposition of his leading principles to all the old maxims of trade, he was able before he quitted his situation in the University to rank some very eminent merchants in the number of his proselytes.” That Provost Cochrane and his brethren were well inclined to these doctrines is probable, as they suffered severely from the duties on American iron; and that interest in economic subjects was strong is proved by the printing of several important books at Glasgow about this time.

The merchants were, however, much under the influence of an economist of the old school, Sir James Steuart, who lived in the neighbourhood, and the progress of Smith’s opinions was more rapid in the University. It was the students, as Dugald Stewart tells us, “that first adopted his system with eagerness and diffused a knowledge of its fundamental principles over this part of the kingdom.”

During these thirteen years at Glasgow Smith kept up his connection with Edinburgh by pretty constant visits. Shorn of royalty by the union of crowns, and of its parliament by the union of parliaments, Edinburgh was slowly recovering in trade what it had lost in political significance. It had kept its Courts of Justice, and its boards of customs and excise. Above all, it was the centre of an intellectual activity which gave Scotland for the first time a name and a fame in European philosophy and letters.

The social and intellectual leader of the new movement was Smith’s early friend and benefactor, Henry Home, who was raised to the bench as Lord Kames in 1752, a man of very liberal and progressive ideas, full of patriotic schemes for the improvement of Scottish art, manufactures, and agriculture. His writings, though highly praised for their learning, have long been forgotten, for sufficient reason. “I am afraid of Kames’s Law Tracts,” Hume once wrote to Smith. “The man might as well think of making a fine sauce by a mixture of wormwood and aloes as an agreeable combination by joining metaphysics and Scottish Law.” Robertson, already a prominent preacher and ecclesiastical politician, was feeling his way towards Edinburgh and literary fame. John Home, a brother minister, was composing the Tragedy of Douglas, counted by Hume, so he told Smith in 1756, “the best, and by French critics the only tragedy in our language.” Another member of this circle, quite a fashionable oddity, who ploughed his own glebe like a peasant, and startled a passer-by with apt quotations from Theocritus, was Wilkie, the author of the Epigoniad, a particular friend and admirer of our philosopher. Then there were the two Dalrymples, both historians, and the gossipy autobiographer, Dr. Carlyle. Three politicians of distinction often adorned Edinburgh society at this time: brilliant Charles Townshend, who was to make a revolution in Smith’s life, James Oswald, his old friend and neighbour, and William Johnstone (Sir William Pulteney). Among the relics of Smith’s correspondence is an introductory letter, dated January 19, 1752, to Oswald, then at the Board of Trade, which “will be delivered to you by Mr. William Johnstone, son of Sir James Johnstone of Westerhall, a young gentleman whom I have known intimately these four years, and of whose discretion, good temper, sincerity, and honour, I have had during all that time frequent proof.” The young gentleman was to give a further signal proof of his discretion by bestowing his affections on a Pulteney, whose vast fortune doubtless consoled him for the surrender of his name. The letter continues:—

“You will find in him too, if you come to know him better, some qualities which from real and unaffected modesty he does not at first discover; a refinement and depth of observation and an accuracy of judgment, joined to a natural delicacy of sentiment, as much improved as study and the narrow sphere of acquaintance this country affords can improve it. He had, first when I knew him, a good deal of vivacity and humour, but he has studied them away. He is an advocate; and though I am sensible of the folly of prophesying with regard to the future fortune of so young a man, yet I could almost venture to foretell that if he lives he will be eminent in that profession. He has, I think, every quality that ought to forward, and not one that should obstruct his progress, modesty and sincerity excepted, and these, it is to be hoped, experience and a better sense of things may in part cure him of. I do not, I assure you, exaggerate knowingly, but could pawn my honour upon the truth of every article.”

A cluster of these and many other stars formed, in 1754, a constellation known as the Select Society, an institution, as we learn from Dugald Stewart’s life of Robertson, “intended partly for philosophical inquiry, and partly for the improvement of the members in public speaking.” It was projected, he says, by Mr. Allan Ramsay, the painter, and a few of his friends—Dr. Robertson, Mr. David Hume, Mr. Adam Smith, Mr. Wedderburn (afterwards Lord Chancellor), Lord Kames, Mr. John Home, Dr. Carlyle, and Sir Gilbert Elliot. Hailes, Monboddo, and Dalrymple were also members. In the Select Society, writes Stewart, “the most splendid talents that have ever adorned this country were roused to their best exertions by the liberal and ennobling discussions of literature and philosophy.”

When the projectors met in May 1754, Smith, who had come from Glasgow, was required to explain the proposals. At the second meeting, as appears from the minutes now preserved in the Advocates’ Library at Edinburgh, he was “Præses,” and gave out as subjects for the next debate (1) whether a general naturalisation of Foreign Protestantism would be advantageous to Britain; and (2) whether bounties on the exportation of corn would be advantageous to manufactures as well as to agriculture.

Many economic questions such as pauperism, slavery, hiring, banking, export bounties on linen, rent, leases, highways, the relative advantages of large and small farms, were discussed by a society which, in Stewart’s words, contributed so much to the fame and improvement of Scotland. A year after its foundation Hume wrote to Allan Ramsay that it had grown to be a national concern. “Young and old, noble and ignoble, witty and dull, laity and clergy, all the world are ambitious of a place amongst us, and on each occasion we are as much solicited by candidates as if we were to choose a member of Parliament.” The society did more than debate. Adam Smith and eight others were appointed managers to carry out a scheme for the promotion of Scottish arts, sciences, manufactures, and agriculture. Executive committees were formed. Contributions poured in; and prizes and premiums large in those days were offered and awarded for every subject under the sun. From the researches of Mr. Rae we learn, for example, that twenty-six prizes were offered in the first year (1755), including three gold medals for the best discovery in science, the best essay on taste, and the best on vegetation. Six silver medals were given, including one for the best and most correctly printed book, another for the best imitation of English blankets, and a third for the best hogshead of strong ale. Four years later the number of prizes given had increased to 142, and they included one for the person who cured most smoky chimneys.

The society sank as suddenly as it rose. After only a decade of brilliant usefulness, the meteor fell, and expired, it is said, in a flash of Townshend’s wit. “Why,” he asked, after listening to a debate rich in eloquence, but unintelligible to a southern ear, “why can you not learn to speak the English language as you have already learned to write it?” So the society died, and Thomas Sheridan, father of the statesman, came to Edinburgh with a course of lectures on English elocution, which he delivered to about three hundred eminent gentlemen in Carrubber’s Close.

Upon the ashes of this famous society arose an equally patriotic but perhaps less beneficent organisation. The Poker Club, as its name indicated, was intended to be an instrument for stirring opinion. The cause to be agitated was the establishment of a Scotch Militia on national lines, to be followed, as some of its radical members hoped, by a parliamentary reform which would “let the industrious farmer and manufacturer share at last in a privilege now engrossed by the great lord, the drunken laird, and the drunkener bailie.”

Adam Smith was one of the original members of the Poker Club, which gathered in most of the Select Society; but before 1776 he had changed his opinions, for, in the Wealth of Nations, he comes to the conclusion that “it is only by means of a well regulated standing army that a civilised country can be defended.” If it relied for its defence on a militia, it would be exposed to conquest. The militia movement is mentioned by Smith in a letter to Strahan (April 4, 1760), in the course of some reflections suggested by the Memoirs of Colonel Hooke. The passage is interesting as a Scotch Whig’s explanation and defence of the disaffection which prevailed north of the Tweed in the early part of the eighteenth century:—

“Apropos to the Pope and the Pretender, have you read Hook’s Memoirs? I have been ill these ten days, otherwise I should have written to you sooner, but I sat up the day before yesterday in my bed and read them thro’ with infinite satisfaction, tho’ they are by no means well written. The substance of what is in them I knew before, tho’ not in such detail. I am afraid they are published at an unlucky time, and may throw a damp upon our militia. Nothing, however, appears to me more excusable than the disaffection of Scotland at that time. The Union was a measure from which infinite good has been derived to this country. The Prospect of that good, however, must then have appeared very remote and very uncertain. The immediate effect of it was to hurt the interest of every single order of men in the country. The dignity of the nobility was undone by it. The greater part of the gentry who had been accustomed to represent their own country in its own Parliament were cut out for ever from all hopes of representing it in a British Parliament. Even the merchants seemed to suffer at first. The trade to the Plantations was, indeed, opened to them. But that was a trade which they knew nothing about; the trade they were acquainted with, that to France, Holland, and the Baltic, was laid under new embarassments, which almost totally annihilated the two first and most important branches of it. The Clergy, too, who were then far from insignificant, were alarmed about the Church. No wonder if at that time all orders of men conspired in cursing a measure hurtful to their immediate interest. The views of their Posterity are now very different; but those views could be seen by but few of our forefathers, by those few in but a confused and imperfect manner.”

In the same letter he asks to be remembered to Benjamin Franklin (who had lately visited Glasgow), and also to Griffiths, the editor of the Monthly Review, which had just paid a handsome tribute to the Theory.

In the notes of lectures, given as we have seen about the time when the Poker Club was established, Smith admitted the necessity of a standing army, but seems to have thought that its abuse should be guarded against by a militia. The Poker Club proved little more than a convivial society, and felt the scarcity and dearness of claret more than the want of a national army. Lord Campbell says that when the duty on French wine was raised to pay for the American War, they “agreed to dissolve the ‘Poker,’ and to form another society which should exist without consumption of any excisable commodity.” When the duties were again reduced by Pitt’s French Treaty in 1786, a Younger Poker Club arose, but Pitt’s master, who had contributed so substantially to this revival of patriotism, was too old or too indifferent to become a member.

In one other important Edinburgh project the Glasgow professor played a prominent part. In 1755 an Edinburgh Review was started to supply the rising authors of North Britain with the stimulus of sympathetic criticism. Wedderburn, then a young advocate, was chosen editor; Robertson and Smith were contributors in chief. But only two numbers appeared of this precursor in name and in intention of the most famous and successful review ever launched in our islands. Smith’s two articles are of considerable, although of unequal, interest. The first and less important is a review of Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary. “When we compare this book with other dictionaries,” writes the critic, “the merit of its author appears very extraordinary.” In previous English dictionaries the chief purpose had been to explain hard words and terms of art; “Mr. Johnson has extended his views much further, and has made a very full collection of all the different meanings of each English word, justified by examples from authors of good reputation.” The defects of the work consisted chiefly in the plan, which was not sufficiently grammatical. To show what he meant he took Johnson’s articles on but and humour, appending more philosophical and lucid articles of his own. Johnson seems to have taken no notice of these criticisms in later editions of the dictionary. We may observe in passing that Smith’s but is better than his humour. He seems singularly mistaken when he observes that “a man of wit is as much above a man of humour as a gentleman is above a buffoon.” In Scotland, he thinks, the usefulness of the Dictionary will soon be felt, “as there is no standard of correct language in conversation.”

A far more remarkable contribution is a letter to the editors, which appeared in the second number. It is a protest against the reviewers confining themselves to accounts of books published in Scotland, a country “which is but just beginning to attempt figuring in the learned world.” He proposes therefore that they should enlarge their scope, and observe with regard to Europe the same plan that was being followed with regard to England, that is to say, examine all books of permanent value while contriving to take notice “of every Scotch production that is tolerably decent.” Smith illustrated his plea by a very luminous and masterly survey of French literature, and a comparison of the French, German, and Italian genius with the English.

The review was intended to appear every six months, but it never reached a third number, either because it was not well received by the public, or because a formidable theologian spied heresy lurking in its pages.

It was at this time that the General Assembly was proposing to pass a censure on Hume’s Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, and to excommunicate the author. Hume wrote to Allan Ramsay in Rome: “You may tell that reverend gentleman the Pope, that there are men here who rail at him, and yet would be much greater persecutors had they equal power. The last Assembly sat on me. They did not propose to burn me, because they cannot, but they intended to give me over to Satan. My friends prevailed, and my damnation has accordingly been postponed a twelve-month, but next Assembly will surely be upon me.” Lord Kames was also attacked; but Smith seems to have escaped, though his turn was to come later.

The pupil of Hutcheson was also in many ways the philosophical disciple and ally of Hume. Their intercourse during all these years was close and constant. They paid mutual visits, and interchanged many letters, too few of which have been preserved. Hume had been abroad, or at Ninewells, during most of Smith’s stay in Edinburgh, and had only just made Edinburgh his home when Smith obtained the professorship at Glasgow; but, as Mr. Rae notes, before a year was out, Smith’s “dear sir” had ripened into “my dearest friend,” and on these terms the two philosophers remained until death parted them.

We have seen how in the spring of 1759 Charles Townshend was much taken with the Theory of Moral Sentiments, and told Oswald he would put his young ward the Duke of Buccleuch under the author’s care. Hume did not at first believe that Townshend would persevere, or if he did, that he would offer such terms as would tempt Smith from Glasgow. But on this occasion he was in earnest and never relinquished the idea, anxious, it is said, to connect the fleeting fame of a parliamentarian with the lasting renown of a philosopher. Townshend had married the widowed Countess of Dalkeith. Her eldest son, the Duke of Buccleuch, was then a boy at Eton, under Hallam, father of the historian. The time when his stepson would leave school was still distant, but Townshend had made up his mind to send the boy abroad. In England it was becoming more and more the fashion for the sons of the nobility to travel abroad when they left school, instead of going to one of the universities. It was thought that they returned home much improved by their travels, and with some knowledge of one or two living languages, whereas if they went to Oxford or Cambridge they would learn nothing but idleness and dissipation. Adam Smith himself afterwards came to the conclusion that foreign travel was no substitute for a sound university training. The schoolboy, he wrote after his continental tour, “commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application either to study or business, than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home.... Nothing but the discredit into which the universities had fallen could ever have brought into repute so very absurd a practice.”

In the summer of 1759 Townshend went to see Smith at Glasgow, and apparently prevailed, for in the following September Smith wrote to him about some books which he had been getting for Buccleuch, as if he were already in the position of an educational adviser to the boy. As might have been expected of one whom Burke immortalised as “the delight and ornament of the House, and the charm of every private society which he honoured with his presence,” Townshend captivated Glasgow. “Everybody here remembers you with the greatest admiration and affection.”

Smith was doubtless informed from time to time of the boy’s progress, but we hear no more of the subject for four years. In the early part of 1763 he invited Hume to pay a visit to Glasgow. Hume was then in Edinburgh; he had just brought out two volumes of his History, and was drinking the nectar of general applause. At the end of March he replied with a bantering reference, perhaps, to his friend’s economic studies: “I set up a chaise in May next, which will give me the liberty of travelling about, and you may be sure a journey to Glasgow will be one of the first I shall undertake. I intend to require with great strictness an account how you have been employing your leisure, and I desire you to be ready for that purpose. Woe be to you if the Balance be against you. Your friends here will also expect that I should bring you with me. It seems to me very long since I saw you.” But in the summer Lord Hertford was appointed Ambassador to the Court of France, and Hume accepted the post of Secretary to the British Embassy at Paris, “with great prospects and expectations.” He told his friend not to expect him back for some time; “but we may meet abroad.” And so they did; for, a couple of months later, Smith received the following letter:—

“Dear Sir,—The time now drawing near when the Duke of Buccleugh intends to go abroad, I take the liberty of renewing the subject to you: that if you should still have the same disposition to travel with him I may have the satisfaction of informing Lady Dalkeith and his Grace of it, and of congratulating them upon an event which I know that they, as well as myself, have so much at heart. The Duke is now at Eton; he will remain there till Christmas. He will then spend some short time in London, that he may be presented at Court, and not pass instantaneously from school to a foreign country, but it were to be wished he should not be long in Town, exposed to the habits and companions of London, before his mind has been more formed and better guarded by education and experience.

“I do not enter at this moment upon the subject of establishment, because, if you have no objection to the situation, I know we cannot differ about the terms. On the contrary, you will find me more solicitous than yourself to make the connection with Buccleugh as satisfactory and advantageous to you as I am persuaded it will be essentially beneficial to him.

“The Duke ... has sufficient talents; a very manly temper, and an integrity of heart and reverence for truth, which in a person of his rank and fortune are the firmest foundations of weight in life and uniform greatness. If it should be agreeable to you to finish his education and mould these excellent materials into a settled character, I make no doubt that he will return to his family and country the very man our fondest hopes have fancied him.

“I go to Town next Friday, and should be obliged to you for your answer to this letter.—I am, with sincere affection and esteem, dear sir your most faithful and most obedient humble servant,

C. Townshend.

Adderbury, 25th October 1763.”

The offer was accepted, and an arrangement concluded, in a pecuniary point of view certainly “satisfactory and advantageous.” Smith was to have a salary of £300 a year with travelling expenses, and a pension of £300 a year for life. He was thus to enjoy, as Mr. Rae says, twice his Glasgow income, and to have it assured till death. Altogether, Smith drew more than £8000 from his three years’ tutorship. On November 8th, “Dr. Smith represented,” so runs the record of the Faculty, “that some interesting business would probably require his leaving the College some time this winter”, and he was thereupon granted leave of absence for three months.

For some time, however, Smith heard nothing more. In the middle of December, when he wrote to tell Hume of Townshend’s letter, he was still in uncertainty. But a few days afterwards it was arranged that they should start early in the new year, and on January the 9th Smith told the Faculty that he should make use of his leave of absence, that he should pay his deputy his half-year’s salary commencing from October the 10th, and that he had returned all his students’ fees. This last act of liberality he was only able to carry out by a display of violence at the end of his last lecture. The scene has luckily been reproduced with unusual animation by the pen of Tytler, Lord Kames’s pedestrian biographer. After concluding his last lecture, and describing the arrangements he had made for them, “he drew from his pocket the several fees of the students, wrapped up in separate paper parcels, and beginning to call up each man by his name, he delivered to the first who was called the money into his hand. The young man peremptorily refused to accept it, declaring that the instruction and pleasure he had already received was much more than he either had repaid or ever could compensate; and a general cry was heard from every one in the room to the same effect. But Mr. Smith was not to be bent from his purpose. After warmly expressing his feelings of gratitude and the strong sense he had of the regard shown to him by his young friends, he told them this was a matter betwixt him and his own mind, and that he could not rest satisfied unless he performed what he deemed right and proper. ‘You must not refuse me this satisfaction; nay, by heavens, gentlemen, you shall not’; and seizing by the coat the young man who stood next to him, he thrust the money into his pocket and then pushed him from him. The rest saw it was in vain to contest the matter, and were obliged to let him take his own way.”

Scotch professors at that time often continued to hold their chairs during a temporary appointment like a travelling tutorship, and paid their salaries to a substitute until they returned. But Smith was no friend of absenteeism. The interest of the College was his chief anxiety, and accordingly in the following month he sent his formal letter of resignation to the Lord Rector, immediately on his arrival in Paris. “I never was,” he writes, “more anxious for the good of the College than at this moment; and I sincerely wish that whoever is my successor may not only do credit to the office by his abilities, but be a comfort to the very excellent men with whom he is likely to spend his life, by the probity of his heart and the goodness of his temper.” (February 14, 1764.)

In accepting his resignation the Senate added a few words which may fittingly conclude our account of what Smith always regarded as the most fruitful and honourable period of his life:—“The University cannot help at the same time expressing their sincere regret at the removal of Dr. Smith, whose distinguished probity and amiable qualities procured him the esteem and affection of his colleagues; whose uncommon genius, great abilities, and extensive learning did so much honour to this society; his elegant and ingenious Theory of Moral Sentiments having recommended him to the esteem of men of taste and literature throughout Europe. His happy talents in illustrating abstracted subjects, and faithful assiduity in communicating useful knowledge, distinguished him as a professor, and at once afforded the greatest pleasure and the most important instruction to the youth under his care.”