on, Garrick, Reynolds, Johnson, Burke, and Fordyce
for the rest of the company.[276]

His great work had not yet attracted much public notice. Its merits
were being fully recognised by the learned, and it was already leaving
its mark on the budget of the year; but it was probable Smith was more
talked about in general company at the time for his letter to Strahan
than for his _Wealth of Nations_. In one little literary circle he was
being zealously but most unjustly decried for taking a shabby revenge
on a worthy young Scotch poet who had ventured to differ from him in
opinion about the merits of the East India Company. Mickle, the author
of the popular song "There's nae luck aboot the hoose," published his
translation of the _Lusiad_ of Camoens in 1775, and dedicated the book
by permission to the Duke of Buccleugh, whose family had been his
father's patrons, and from whose interest he hoped to obtain some
advancement himself. When the work appeared the author sent a
nicely-bound presentation copy to the Duke, but received no
acknowledgment, and at length a common friend waited on his Grace,
and, says one of Mickle's biographers, "heard with the indignation and
contempt it deserved, a declaration that the work was at that time
unread, and had been represented not to have the merit it had been
first said to possess, and therefore nothing could be done on the
subject of his mission." A dedication in those days was often only a
more dignified begging letter, and Mickle's friends declared that he
had been cruelly wronged, because the Duke had not only done nothing
for him himself, but by accepting the dedication had prevented the
author from going to some other patron who might have done something.
Whatever could have been the reason for this sudden coolness of the
Duke? Mickle and his little group of admirers declared it was all due
to an ill word from the Duke's great mentor, Adam Smith, whom they
alleged to have borne Mickle a grudge for having in the preface to the
_Lusiad_ successfully exposed the futility of some of the views about
the East India Company propounded in the _Wealth of Nations_.[277]

But since the _Wealth of Nations_ was only published in 1776, its
opinions obviously could not, even with the vision and faculty divine
of the poet, be commented on either favourably or unfavourably in the
_Lusiad_, which was published in 1775. The comments on Smith's views
appeared first in subsequent editions of Mickle's