much
ruffled. At first Smith would only answer, 'He's a brute; he's a
brute;' but on closer examination it appeared that Johnson no sooner
saw Smith than he attacked him for some point of his famous letter on
the death of Hume. Smith vindicated the truth of his statement. 'What
did Johnson say?' was the universal inquiry. 'Why, he said,' replied
Smith, with the deepest impression of resentment, 'he said, You lie.'
'And what did you reply?' 'I said, You are a son of a ----!' On such
terms did these two great moralists meet and part, and such was the
classical dialogue between two great teachers of philosophy."

Wilberforce's version is identical with Scott's, except that it
commits the absurdity of making Smith tell not the story itself, but
the story of his first telling it. "'Some of our friends,' said Adam
Smith, 'were anxious that we should meet, and a party was arranged for
the purpose in the course of the evening. I was soon after entering
another society, and perhaps with a manner a little confused. "Have
you met Dr. Johnson?" my friends exclaimed. "Yes, I have." "And what
passed between you?"'" and so on. All this at any rate is legendary
outgrowth on the very face of it, and nonsensical even for that. But
even the story itself, as told so circumstantially by Scott, is
demonstrably mythical in most of its circumstances. Johnson was never
in Glasgow except one day, the 29th of October 1773, and in October
1773 Smith was in London, and as we know from an incidental
parenthesis in the _Wealth of Nations_,[124] engaged in the
composition of that great work. Hume, again, did not die till 1776, so
that there were better and more "obvious reasons" than Scott imagined
for Boswell's omitting mention of a meeting between Johnson and Smith
at Glasgow which never took place, and a collision between them about
a famous letter which was not then written. Time, place, and subject
are all alike wrong, but these Scott might think but the mortal parts
of the story, and he sometimes varied them in the telling himself.
Moore heard him tell it at his own table at Abbotsford somewhat
differently from the version he gave to Croker.[125] But when so much
is plainly the insensible creation of the imagination, what reliance
can be placed on the remainder? All we know is that apparently at
their very first meeting those two philosophers did, in Strahan's
house in London in September 1761, have a personal altercation of an
outrageous char