[41] Stewart's _Works_, x. 12.

[42] Richardson's _Life of Arthur_. See _Arthur's Discourses_, p. 510.

[43] Richardson's _Life of Arthur_. See _Arthur's Discourses_, p. 508.

[44] Stewart's _Works_, x. 12.

[45] Sinclair's _Old Times and Distant Places_, p. 9.

[46] Hamilton's _Reid_, p. 43.

[47] M'Cosh, _Scottish Philosophy_, p. 66.

[48] Boswell's _Correspondence with Erskine_, p. 26.

[49] Currie's _Memoirs of James Currie, M.D._, ii. 317.

[50] Ramsay, _Scotland and Scotsmen_, i. 462, 463.

[51] _Steuart's Works_, vi. 379.

[52] _Ibid._ vi. 378.

[53] Dr. Cleland's account of Glasgow in _New Statistical Account of
Scotland_, vi. 139.

[54] Stewart's _Works_, ed. Hamilton; x. 68.

CHAPTER VI

THE COLLEGE ADMINISTRATOR

A common misconception regarding Smith is that he was as helpless as a
child in matters of business. One of his Edinburgh neighbours remarked
of him to Robert Chambers that it was strange a man who wrote so well
on exchange and barter was obliged to get a friend to buy his horse
corn for him. This idea of his helplessness in the petty transactions
of life arose from observing his occasional fits of absence and his
habitual simplicity of character, but his simplicity, nobody denies,
was accompanied by exceptional acuteness and practical sagacity, and
his fits of absence seem to have been neither so frequent nor so
prolonged as they are commonly represented. Samuel Rogers spent most
of a week with him in Edinburgh the year before his death, and did not
remark his absence of mind all the time. Anyhow, during his thirteen
years' residence at Glasgow College, Smith seems to have had more to
do with the business of the College, petty or important, than any
other professor, and his brethren in the Senate of that University
cannot have seen in him any marked failing or incapacity for ordinary
business. They threw on his shoulders an ample share of the committee
and general routine work of the place, and set him to audit accounts,
or inspect the drains in the College court, or see the holly hedge in
the College garden uprooted, or to examine the encroachments on the
College lands on the Molendinar Burn, without any fear of his
forgetting his business on the way. They entrusted him for years with
the post of College Quaestor or Treasurer, in which inattention or the
want of sound business habits might inflict injury even on their
pecuniary interests. They made him one of the two c