s generosity. They were themselves violent
persecutors at home to the utmost of their power. Besides,
the Huguenots in France were not persecuted; they were
really seditious, turbulent people, whom their king was not
able to reduce to obedience. The French persecutions did not
begin till sixty years after.

Your objection to the Irish massacre is just, but falls not
on the execution but the subject. Had I been to describe the
massacre of Paris I should not have fallen into that fault,
but in the Irish massacre no single eminent man fell, or by
a remarkable death. If the elocution of the whole chapter be
blamable, it is because my conceptions laboured most to
start an idea of my subject, which is there the most
important, but that misfortune is not unusual.--I am,
etc.[80]

In 1752 Smith was chosen a member of the Philosophical Society of
Edinburgh, which, after an interregnum caused by the rebellion, was
revived in that year, with David Hume for Secretary, and which was
eventually merged in the Royal Society in 1784. But we know of no part
he took, if he took any, in its proceedings. Of the Rankenian Society,
again--the famous old club in Ranken's Coffee-house, to which Colin
Maclaurin and other eminent men belonged, and some of whose members
carried on a philosophical controversy with Berkeley, and, if we can
believe Ramsay of Ochtertyre, were pressed by the good bishop to
accompany him in his Utopian mission to Bermuda--Smith was never even
a member, though it survived till 1774. But he took a principal part
in founding a third society in 1754, which far eclipsed either of
these--at least for a time--in _eclat_, and has left a more celebrated
name, the Select Society.

The Select Society was established in imitation of the academies which
were then common in the larger towns of France, and was partly a
debating society for the discussion of topics of the day, and partly a
patriotic society for the promotion of the arts, sciences, and
manufactures of Scotland. The idea was first mooted by Allan Ramsay,
the painter, who had travelled in France as long ago as 1739, with
James Oswald, M.P., and was struck with some of the French
institutions. Smith was one of the first of Ramsay's friends to be
consulted about the suggestion, and threw himself so heartily into it
that when the painter announced his first formal meeting for the
purpose on the 23rd o