t Glasgow, and the only wonder is that
Smith escaped so lightly, for but a few years before three students
were expelled from Oxford for coquetting with Deism, and a fourth, of
whom better hopes seem to have been formed, had his degree deferred
for two years, and was required in the interval to translate into
Latin as a reformatory exercise the whole of Leslie's _Short and Easy
Method with the Deists_.[13]

Except for the great resource of study, Smith's life at Oxford seems
not to have been a very happy one. For one thing, he was in poor
health and spirits a considerable part of the time, as appears from
the brief extracts from his letters published by Lord Brougham. When
Brougham was writing his account of Smith he got the use of a number
of letters written by the latter to his mother from Oxford between
1740 and 1746, which probably exist somewhere still, but which, he
found, contained nothing of any general interest. "They are almost
all," he says, "upon mere family and personal matters, most of them
indeed upon his linen and other such necessaries, but all show his
strong affection for his mother." The very brief extracts Brougham
makes from them, however, inform us that Smith was then suffering from
what he calls "an inveterate scurvy and shaking in the head," for
which he was using the new remedy of tar-water which Bishop Berkeley
had made the fashionable panacea for all manner of diseases. At the
end of July 1744 Smith says to his mother: "I am quite inexcusable for
not writing to you oftener. I think of you every day, but always defer
writing till the post is just going, and then sometimes business or
company, but oftener laziness, hinders me. Tar-water is a remedy very
much in vogue here at present for almost all diseases. It has
perfectly cured me of an inveterate scurvy and shaking in the head. I
wish you'd try it. I fancy it might be of service to you." In another
and apparently subsequent letter, however, he states that he had had
the scurvy and shaking as long as he remembered anything, and that the
tar-water had not removed them. On the 29th of November 1743 he makes
the curious confession: "I am just recovered from a violent fit of
laziness, which has confined me to my elbow-chair these three
months."[14] Brougham thinks these statements show symptoms of
hypochondria; but they probably indicate no more than the ordinary
lassitude and exhaustion ensuing from overwork. Hume, when about the
same age, had