f May 1754, Smith was not only one of the fifteen
persons present, but was entrusted with the duty of explaining the
object of the meeting and the nature of the proposed institution. Dr.
A. Carlyle, who was present, says this was the only occasion he ever
heard Smith make anything in the nature of a speech, and he was but
little impressed with Smith's powers as a public speaker. His voice
was harsh, and his enunciation thick, approaching even to
stammering.[81] Of course many excellent speakers often stutter much
in making a simple business explanation which they are composing as
they go along, and Smith always stuttered and hesitated a deal for the
first quarter of an hour, even in his class lectures, though his
elocution grew free and animated, and often powerful, as he warmed to
his task.

The Society was established and met with the most rapid and remarkable
success. The fifteen original members soon grew to a hundred and
thirty, and men of the highest rank as well as literary name flocked
to join it. Kames and Monboddo, Robertson and Ferguson and Hume,
Carlyle and John Home, Blair and Wilkie and Wallace, the statistician;
Islay Campbell and Thomas Miller, the future heads of the Court of
Session; the Earls of Sutherland, Hopetoun, Marchmont, Morton,
Rosebery, Erroll, Aboyne, Cassilis, Selkirk, Glasgow, and Lauderdale;
Lords Elibank, Garlies, Gray, Auchinleck, and Hailes; John Adam, the
architect; Dr. Cullen, John Coutts, the banker and member for the
city; Charles Townshend, the witty statesman; and a throng of all that
was distinguished in the country, were enrolled as members, and, what
is more, frequented its meetings. It met every Friday evening from six
to nine, at first in a room in the Advocates' Library, but when that
became too small for the numbers that began to attend its meetings, in
a room hired from the Mason Lodge above the Laigh Council House; and
its debates, in which the younger advocates and ministers--men like
Wedderburn and Robertson--took the chief part, became speedily famous
over all Scotland as intellectual displays to which neither the
General Assembly of the Kirk nor the Imperial Parliament could show
anything to rival. Hume wrote in 1755 to Allan Ramsay, who had by that
time gone to settle in Rome, that the Select Society "has grown to be
a national concern. Young and old, noble and ignoble, witty and dull,
laity and clergy, all the world are ambitious of a place amongst us,
and on each