sent the following extract to Hume:
"Though I am very happy here, I long passionately to rejoin my old
friends, and if I had once got fairly to your side of the water, I
think I should never cross it again. Recommend the same sober way of
thinking to Hume. He is light-headed, tell him, when he talks of
coming to spend the remainder of his days here or in France. Remember
me to him most affectionately."[186]

His return, for which he was then looking with so much desire, came
sooner than he anticipated, and came, unfortunately, with a cloud. His
younger pupil, the Hon. Hew Campbell Scott, was assassinated in the
streets of Paris, on the 18th of October 1766, in his nineteenth
year;[187] and immediately thereafter they set out for London,
bringing the remains of Mr. Scott along with them, and accompanied by
Lord George Lennox, Hume's successor as Secretary of Legation. The
London papers announce their arrival at Dover on the 1st of November.
The tutorship, which ended with this melancholy event, was always
remembered with great satisfaction and gratitude by the surviving
pupil. "In October 1766," writes the Duke of Buccleugh to Dugald
Stewart, "we returned to London, after having spent near three years
together without the slightest disagreement or coolness, and, on my
part, with every advantage that could be expected from the society of
such a man. We continued to live in friendship till the hour of his
death, and I shall always remain with the impression of having lost a
friend whom I loved and respected, not only for his great talents, but
for every private virtue."

Smith's choice for this post of travelling tutor was thought in many
quarters at the time to be a very strange choice. Shrewd old Dr.
Carlyle thought it so strange that he professes to be quite unable as
a man of the world to understand Charles Townshend making it, except
"for his own glory of having sent an eminent Scotch philosopher to
travel with the Duke."[188] He thought Smith had too much "probity and
benevolence" in his own soul to suspect ill in another or check it,
and that a man who seemed too absent to make his own way about could
hardly be expected to look efficiently after the goings of another.
"He was," says Carlyle, "the most absent man in company I ever knew,"
and "he appeared very unfit for the intercourse of the world as a
travelling tutor."[189]

Still Townshend's choice was thoroughly justified by the result, and
Carlyle admits it,