ded to his unreserved communications
in private companies, rendered him peculiarly liable"; and that he
expressed himself "with a good deal of that honest and indignant
warmth which is perhaps unavoidable by a man who is conscious of the
purity of his intentions when he suspects that advantages have been
taken of the frankness of his temper." It would appear that some one,
who had got hold of Smith's ideas through attending his class or
frequenting his company, either had published them, or was believed to
be going to publish them as his own.

The writer of the obituary notice of Smith in the _Monthly Review_ for
1790 alleges that in this Glasgow period Smith lived in such constant
apprehension of being robbed of his ideas that, if he saw any of his
students take notes of his lectures, he would instantly stop him and
say, "I hate scribblers." But this is directly contradicted by the
account of Professor John Millar, who, as we have seen, was a student
in Smith's classes himself, and who expressly states both that the
permission to take notes was freely given by Smith to his students,
and that the privilege was the occasion of frequent abuse. "From the
permission given to students of taking notes," says Millar, "many
observations and opinions contained in these lectures (the lectures on
rhetoric and belles-lettres) have either been detailed in separate
dissertations or engrossed in general collections which have since
been given to the public." In those days manuscript copies of a
popular professor's lectures, transcribed from his students'
notebooks, were often kept for sale in the booksellers' shops. Blair's
lectures on rhetoric, for example, were for years in general
circulation in this intermediate state, and it was the publication of
his criticism on Addison, taken from one of the unauthorised
transcripts, in Kippis's _Biographia Britannica_, that at length
instigated Blair to give his lectures to the press himself. A
professor was thus always liable to have his unpublished thought
appropriated by another author without any acknowledgment at all, or
published in such an imperfect form that he would hardly care to
acknowledge it himself. If Smith, therefore, exhibited a jealousy over
his rights to his own thought, as has been suggested, Millar's
observation shows him to have had at any rate frequent cause; but
neither at that time of his life nor any other was he animated by an
undue or unreasonable jealousy of this