now of our club. It has lost its select merit." But
another member of the club, Dean Barnard--husband of the authoress of
"Auld Robin Gray"--appreciates his worth better, though he wrote the
lines in which his appreciation occurs before the _Wealth of Nations_
appeared, and his words may therefore be taken perhaps to convey the
impression made by Smith's conversation. One of the Dean's verses
runs--

If I have thoughts and can't express 'em,
Gibbon shall teach me how to dress 'em
In form select and terse;
Jones teach me modesty and Greek,
Smith how to think, Burke how to speak,
And Beauclerk to converse.

Smith's conversation seems, from all the accounts we have of it, to
have been the conversation of a thinker, often lecturing rather than
talk, but always instructive and solid. William Playfair, the brother
of Professor John Playfair, the mathematician, says, "Those persons
who have ever had the pleasure to be in his company may recollect that
even in his common conversation the order and method he pursued
without the smallest degree of formality or stiffness were beautiful,
and gave a sort of pleasure to all who listened to him."[236]

Bennet Langton mentions the "decisive professorial manner" in which he
was used to talk, and according to Boswell, Topham Beauclerk conceived
a high opinion of Smith's conversation at first, but afterwards lost
it, for reasons unreported, though if Beauclerk was himself, as Dean
Barnard indicates, the model converser of the club, he would probably
grow tired of expository lectures, however excellent and instructive.
A criticism of Garrick's is more curious. After listening to Smith one
evening, the great player turned to a friend and whispered, "What say
you to this? eh, flabby, eh?" but whatever may have been the case that
particular evening, flabbiness at least was not a characteristic of
Smith's talk. It erred rather in excess of substance. He had Johnson's
solidity and weight, without Johnson's force and vivacity. Henry
Mackenzie, author of the _Man of Feeling_, talking of Smith soon after
his death with Samuel Rogers, said of him, "With a most retentive
memory, his conversation was solid beyond that of any man. I have
often told him after half an hour's conversation, 'Sir, you have said
enough to make a book.'"[237] His conversation, moreover, was
particularly wide in its range. Dugald Stewart says that though Smith
seldom started a topic of con