and good-humoured and gracious with me the
whole evening, and he has been so on every occasion that we have met
since. I have often said laughing that I have been in a great measure
indebted to Smith for my good reception."[121]

Now this incident must have occurred years before 1778, the date of
Ramsay's dinner-party at which it was related, for Robertson speaks of
having met Johnson many times between; and it probably occurred before
1763, because in 1763 Boswell mentions in his journal having told
Johnson one evening that Smith had in his lectures in Glasgow
expressed the strongest preference for rhyme over blank verse, and
Johnson alludes in his reply to an unfriendly meeting he had once had
with Smith. "Sir," said he, "I was once in company with Smith, and we
did not take to each other, but had I known that he loved rhyme so
much as you tell me he does I should have hugged him."[122] This
answer seems to imply that the meeting was not quite recent--not in
1763--and if it occurred before 1763, it must have been in 1761.

It was, no doubt, this unhappy altercation that gave rise to the
legendary anecdote which has obtained an immortality it ill deserved,
but which cannot be passed over here, because it has been given to the
world by three independent authorities of such importance as Sir
Walter Scott, Lord Jeffrey, and Bishop Wilberforce. Scott communicates
the anecdote to Croker for his edition of Boswell's _Johnson_, as it
was told him by Professor John Millar of Glasgow, who had it from
Smith himself the night the affair happened. Wilberforce gives it
ostensibly as it was heard by his father from Smith's lips; and
Jeffrey, in reviewing Wilberforce's book in the _Edinburgh Review_,
says he heard the story, in substantially the same form as Wilberforce
tells it, nearly fifty years before, "from the mouth of one of a party
into which Mr. Smith came immediately after the collision."

The story, as told by Scott, is in this wise:[123] "Mr. Boswell has
chosen to omit (in his account of Johnson's visit to Glasgow), for
reasons which will be presently obvious, that Johnson and Adam Smith
met at Glasgow; but I have been assured by Professor John Millar that
they did so, and that Smith, leaving the party in which he had met
Johnson, happened to come to another company where Millar was. Knowing
that Smith had been in Johnson's society, they were anxious to know
what had passed, and the more so as Dr. Smith's temper seemed