et been bestowed upon
either or both the other two.--I have the honour to be, with
the highest esteem and regard, my Lord, your Lordship's most
obliged and obedient servant,

ADAM SMITH.[211]

A week later Smith wrote Lord Hailes another letter, "giving," says
Lord Brougham, "what is evidently the beginning of his speculations on
the price of silver," but the letter seems to be now lost, and Lord
Brougham quotes from it only the following sentences on the Douglas
cause. "If the rejoicings which I read of in the public papers in
different places on account of the Douglas cause, had no more
foundation than those which were said to have been in this place,
there has been very little joy upon the occasion. There was here no
sort of rejoicing of any kind, unless four schoolboys having set up
three candles upon the trone by way of an illumination, is to be
considered as such."[212]

The first of these letters was written almost immediately after Smith
heard of the decision of the House of Lords in the famous Douglas
case. The news of the decision only reached Edinburgh on the 2nd of
March, and was received with such popular enthusiasm that the whole
city was illuminated. Smith walking by the shore at Kirkcaldy would
have seen the bonfires blazing on Salisbury Crags, and he seems to
have heard before writing that the house of the Lord President of the
Court of Session, who was opposed to the Douglas claim, was attacked
by the mob, and the President himself insulted next morning in the
street on his way to Court. No civil lawsuit ever excited so much
popular interest or feeling. The question, it will be remembered, was
whether Mr. Douglas, who had been served heir to the estates of the
late Duke of Douglas, was really the son of the Duke's sister, Lady
Jane, by her husband, Sir John Stewart of Grandtully, whom she had
secretly married abroad when she was already fifty years old, or
whether he was an impostor, the son of a Frenchwoman, whom Lady Jane
had brought up as her own son with a view to the inheritance of those
estates. Everybody in Scotland was for the time either a Douglas or a
Hamilton, and the sentimental elements in the case had enlisted
popular sympathy strongly on the Douglas side. Smith, as will be seen
from those letters, was quite as strong and even impassioned a
partisan on the unpopular and losing side, and Lord Hailes having been
one of the judges who voted with the Lord President for