riting this letter, and spent most
of the next four years there. We find him there in May 1773, for he is
admitted to the Royal Society on the 27th of that month; he is there
in September, for Ferguson then writes to him as if he were still
there. He is there in February 1774, for Hume writes him in that
month, "Pray what accounts are these we hear of Franklyn's
conduct?"--a question he would hardly have addressed except to one in
a better position for hearing the truth about Franklin than he was
himself. He is there in September 1774, for he writes Cullen from town
in that month, and speaks of having been for some time in it. He is
there in January 1775, for on the 11th Bishop Percy met him at dinner
at Sir Joshua Reynolds', along with Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, and
others.[230] He is there in February, for a young friend, Patrick
Clason, addresses a letter to him during that month to the care of
Cadell, the bookseller, in the Strand. He is there in December, for on
the 27th Horace Walpole writes the Countess of Ossory that "Adam Smith
told us t'other night at Beauclerk's that Major Preston--one of two,
but he is not sure which--would have been an excellent commander some
years hence if he had seen any service. I said it was a pity that the
war had not been put off till the Major should be some years
older."[231] He returned to Scotland in April 1776, about a month
after his book was issued, but we find him back again in London in
January 1777, for his letter to Governor Pownall in that month is
dated from Suffolk Street. Whether the first three years of his stay
in London was continuous I cannot say, but it would almost appear so
from the circumstance that nothing remains to indicate the contrary.

Those three years were spent upon the _Wealth of Nations_. Much of the
book as we know it must have been written in London. When he went up
to London he had no idea that any fresh investigations he contemplated
instituting there would detain him so long. He wrote Pulteney, as we
have seen, even in the previous September that the book would be
finished in a few months, and he led not only Hume but Adam Ferguson
also to look for its publication in 1773. In a footnote to the fourth
edition of his _History of Civil Society_, published in that year,
Ferguson says, "The public will probably soon be furnished (by Mr.
Smith, author of the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_) with a theory of
national economy equal to what has ever appeared o