Tom, you and I, if you please,
Must take care not to laugh ourselves out of our fees.

Then we remember what Jeffrey says of "the magical vivacity" of the
conversation of Professor John Millar.

FOOTNOTES:

[65] Add. MSS., 6856.

[66] Carlyle's _Autobiography_, p. 73.

[67] Fleming's _Scottish Banking_, p. 53.

[68] Oswald's _Correspondence_, p. 229.

[69] _Caldwell Papers_, ii. 3.

[70] _Wealth of Nations_, Book II. chap. ii.

[71] _Notices and Documents illustrative of the Literary History of
Glasgow_, p. 132.

[72] Strang's _Clubs of Glasgow_, 2nd ed. p. 314.

[73] Ramsay's _Scotland and Scotsmen in Eighteenth Century_, i. 468.

[74] Smiles's _Lives of Boulton and Watt_, p. 112.

CHAPTER VIII

EDINBURGH ACTIVITIES

During his residence in Glasgow Smith continued to maintain intimate
relations with his old friends in Edinburgh. He often ran through by
coach to visit them, though before the road was improved it took
thirteen hours to make the journey; he spent among them most part of
many of his successive vacations; and he took an active share, along
with them, in promoting some of those projects of literary,
scientific, and social improvement with which Scotland was then rife.
His patron, Henry Home, had in 1752 been raised to the bench as Lord
Kames, and was devoting his new-found leisure to those works of
criticism and speculation which soon gave him European fame. David
Hume, after his defeat at Glasgow, had settled for a time into the
modest post of librarian to the Faculty of Advocates, and was writing
his _History of England_ in his dim apartments in the Canongate. Adam
Ferguson, who threw up his clerical calling in 1754, and wrote Smith
from Groningen to give him "clerical titles" no more, for he was "a
downright layman," came to Edinburgh, and was made Hume's successor in
the Advocates' Library in 1757 and professor in the University in
1759. Robertson did not live in Edinburgh till 1758, but he used to
come to town every week with his neighbour John Home before the latter
left Scotland in 1757, and they held late sittings with Hume and the
other men of letters in the evening. Gilbert Elliot entered
Parliament in 1754, but was always back during the recess with news of
men and things in the capital. The two Dalrymples--Sir David of
Hailes, and Sir John of Cousland--were toiling at their respective
histories, and both were personal friends of Smith's; while another,
of whom S