ce that all was wrong, and that I must change either the subject or
the style of my address."[45]

The great majority of his students were young men preparing for the
Presbyterian ministry, a large contingent of them--quite a third of
the whole--being Irish dissenters who were unfairly excluded from the
university of their own country, but appear to have been no very
worthy accession to the University of Glasgow. We know of no word of
complaint against them from Smith, but they were a sore trial both to
Hutcheson and to Reid. Reid says he always felt in lecturing to those
"stupid Irish teagues" as St. Anthony must have felt when he preached
to the fishes,[46] and Hutcheson writes a friend in the north of
Ireland that his Irish students were far above taking any interest in
their work, and that although he had "five or six young gentlemen from
Edinburgh, men of fortune and fine genius, studying law, these
Irishmen thought them poor bookworms."[47] Smith had probably even
more of this stamp of law students than Hutcheson. Henry Erskine
attended his class on jurisprudence as well as his elder brother.
Boswell was there in 1759, and was made very proud by the certificate
he received from his professor at the close of the session, stating
that he, Mr. James Boswell, was "happily possessed of a facility of
manners."[48] After the publication of the _Theory of Moral
Sentiments_, students came even from a greater distance. Lord
Shelburne, who was an enthusiastic admirer of that work, sent his
younger brother, the Honourable Thomas Fitzmaurice, for a year or two
to study under Smith, before sending him to Oxford in 1761 to read law
with Sir William Blackstone. Mr. Fitzmaurice, who married the Countess
of Orkney, and is the progenitor of the present Orkney family, rose to
a considerable political position, and would have risen higher but for
falling into ill health in the prime of life and remaining a complete
invalid till his death in 1793, but he never forgot the years he spent
as a student in Smith's class and a boarder in Smith's house. Dr.
Currie, the well-known author of the _Life of Burns_, was his medical
attendant in his latter years, and Dr. Currie says his conversation
always turned back to his early life, and particularly to the pleasant
period he had spent under Smith's roof in Glasgow. Currie has not,
however, recorded any reminiscences of those conversations.[49] Two
Russian students came in 1762, and Smith had twi