s house in 1757 for the
house of Dr. Dick, Professor of Natural Philosophy, who died in that
year; and he left Dick's house in turn for Dr. Leechman's, on the
promotion of that divine to the Principalship in 1762. These houses
are now demolished with the rest of the old College of Glasgow, so
that we cannot mark the gradation of comfort that may have determined
these successive changes; and besides they may have been determined by
no positive preference of the economist himself, but by the desires of
his mother and his aunt, Miss Jane Douglas, who both lived with him in
Glasgow, and whose smallest wishes it was the highest ambition of his
affectionate nature to gratify.

In Smith's day there were only some 300 students at Glasgow College in
all, and the Moral Philosophy chair alone had never more than 80 or 90
in the public class and 20 in the private. The public class did not
mean a free class, as it does on the Continent; it really was the
dearer of the two, the fee in the private class being only a guinea,
while the fee of the public class was a guinea and a half. The public
class was the ordinary class taken for graduation and other purposes,
and obligatory by academic authority; the private was a special class,
undertaken, with the permission of the Senatus, for those who wished
to push the subject further; and to harmonise this account of them
with what has been previously said of the income Smith drew from fees,
it is necessary to explain that many of the students who attended
these classes paid no fees, according to a custom which still prevails
in Scotch universities, and by which one was considered a _civis_ of a
class he had attended for two years, and might thereafter attend it
whenever he chose without charge. Many in this way attended the Moral
Philosophy class four or five years, and among them, as Dr. Reid
informs us, quite a number of preachers and advanced students of
divinity and law, before whom, the worthy doctor confesses, he used to
stand in awe to speak without the most careful preparation.

The College session was then longer than it is now, extending from the
10th of October to the 10th of June, and the classes began at once
earlier in the morning and continued later at night. Smith commenced
his labours before daybreak by his public class from 7.30 to 8.30
A.M.; he then held at 11 A.M. an hour's examination on the lecture he
delivered in the morning, though to this examination only a third of