w into a great
economist.

It need scarce be said that the Glasgow of the middle of last century
was a very different city from the Glasgow of to-day. It was in size
and appearance a mere provincial town of 23,000 inhabitants. Broom
still grew on the Broomielaw; a few cobles were the only craft on the
river; and the rude wharf was the resort of idlers, watching the
fishermen on the opposite side cast for salmon, and draw up netfuls on
the green bank. The Clyde was not deepened till 1768. Before that the
whole tonnage dues at Glasgow were only eight pounds a year, and for
weeks together not a single vessel with a mast would be seen on the
water. St. Enoch Square was a private garden; Argyle Street an
ill-kept country road; and the town herd still went his rounds every
morning with his horn, calling the cattle from the Trongate and the
Saltmarket to their pasture on the common meadows in the now
densely-populated district of the Cowcaddens.

Glasgow in these its younger days struck every traveller chiefly for
its beauty. Mrs. Montagu thought it the most beautiful city in Great
Britain, and Defoe, a few years before, said it was "the cleanest and
beautifullest and best built city in Britain, London excepted." As
Mrs. Bellamy approached it on the occasion I have mentioned in order
to open the new theatre in 1764, she says "the magnificence of the
buildings and the beauty of the river ...elated her heart"; and Smith
himself, we know, once suffered for praising its charms. It was at a
London table, and Johnson was present, who, liking neither Smith nor
his Scotch city, cut him short by asking, "Pray, sir, have you seen
Brentford?" Boswell, who took a pride in Glasgow himself, calling it
"a beautiful city," afterwards expostulated with the doctor for this
rough interruption: "Now, sir," said he, "was not that rude?" The full
rudeness is only apparent when we remember that Brentford was in that
day a byword for dreariness and dirt--Thomson in the _Castle of
Indolence_ calls it "a town of mud." When Johnson visited Glasgow,
however, he joined the troop of its admirers himself, and Boswell took
the opportunity to put him then in mind of his question to Smith, and
whisper to him, "Don't you feel some remorse?"

But Glasgow had already begun its transition from the small provincial
to the great commercial capital, and was therefore at a stage of
development of special value to the philosophical observer. Though
still only a qui