ld, Gee, Mun, Law, and Petty.

In the University type-foundry Smith took an active interest, because
he was a warm friend and associate of the accomplished type-founder.
Wilson had been bred a physician, but gave up his practice to become
type-founder, and devoted himself besides, as I have just mentioned,
to astronomy, to which Smith also at this period of his life gave some
attention. Smith indeed was possibly then writing his fragment on the
history of astronomy, which, though not published till after his
death, was, we are informed by Dugald Stewart, the earliest of all his
compositions, being the first part of an extensive work on the history
of all the sciences which he had at this time projected. Wilson,
having gone to large expense both of time and money to cast the Greek
type for the University Homer, and having never found another customer
for the fount except the University printer, went up to London in 1759
to push around, if possible, for orders, and was furnished by Smith
with a letter of recommendation to Hume, who was then residing there.
Hume writes to Smith on the 29th of July: "Your friend Mr. Wilson
called on me two or three days ago when I was abroad, and he left your
letter. I did not see him till to-day. He seems a very modest,
sensible, ingenious man. Before I saw him I spoke to Mr. A. Millar
about him, and found him much disposed to serve him. I proposed
particularly to Mr. Millar that it was worthy of so eminent a
bookseller as he to make a complete elegant set of the classics, which
might set up his name equal to the Alduses, Stevenses, or Elzevirs,
and that Mr. Wilson was the properest person in the world to assist
him in such a project. He confessed to me that he had sometimes
thought of it, but that his great difficulty was to find a man of
letters that could correct the press. I mentioned the matter to
Wilson, who said he had a man of letters in his eye one Lyon, a
nonjuring clergyman of Glasgow. I would desire your opinion of
him."[60]

When Wilson came to reside in the College in 1762, after his
appointment to the chair of Astronomy, he found it inconvenient to go
to and fro between the College and Camlachie to attend to the
type-foundry, and petitioned the Senate to build him a founding-house
in the College grounds, basing his claim on their custom of giving
accommodation to the arts subservient to learning, on his own services
to the University in the matter of the Greek types before