r what are
the most prudent measures to take for your sake, or whether to take
any. Mr. Smith is too busy or too indolent, but I flatter myself Dr.
Black will be happy to make out this memorial for you. Let me know if
I have any chance of seeing you this winter. I have none of being at
Glasgow, and therefore wish you and Mr. Smith would come here, or you
by yourself would come here in the Christmas vacance."

The memorial alluded to in this letter was no doubt a memorial to
Government in behalf of a project then promoted by the Earl of
Selkirk and other friends of Foulis, of settling a salary on him for
directing an institution so useful to the nation as the Academy of
Design. Whether Smith overcame his alleged indolence and drew up the
memorial I cannot say, but this whole letter shows that Smith and
Black were the two friends in Glasgow whom Foulis was in the habit of
principally consulting, and the last sentence seems to indicate that
Smith's hand in the business was hardly less intimate than Dalrymple's
own. It may be noticed too how completely Sir John Dalrymple's ideas
of Smith, as implied in this letter, differ from those which are
current now, and how he sends a tradesman to the philosopher for
advice on practical points in his trade. As to pure questions of art,
whether this work or that is finest, he thinks Foulis himself may
possibly be the best judge, but when it comes to a question as to
which will sell the best--and that was the question for the success of
the project--then he is urged to take the practical mind of Smith to
his counsels. Though Smith's leanings were not to practical life, his
judgment, as any page of the _Wealth of Nations_ shows, was of the
most eminently practical kind. He had little of the impulse to meddle
in affairs or the itch to manage them that belongs to more bustling
people, but had unquestionably a practical mind and capacity.

If Smith was consulted by Foulis in this way about the management of
the Academy of Design, we may safely infer that he had also more to do
with the Foulis press than merely visiting the office to see the
famous _Iliad_ while it was on the case. Smith's connection with
Foulis began before he went to Glasgow, by the publication of Hamilton
of Bangour's poems by the University press, and I think it not
unreasonable to see traces of Smith's suggestion in the number of
early economic books which Foulis reissued after the year 1750, works
of writers like Chi