s of Aberdeen after his death. Most of his own more particular
friends too--the better aristocracy of letters and science--lived
about him here. If it was to Edinburgh, as Gibbon remarks, that "taste
and philosophy seemed to have retired from the smoke and hurry of the
immense capital of London," it was in the ancient smoke and leisure of
the Canongate they found their sanctuary. Robertson flitted out,
indeed, to the Grange House; Black--Smith's special crony in this
Edinburgh period--to the present Blind Asylum in Nicolson Street, then
a country villa; and Adam Ferguson to a place at the Sciennes which,
though scarce two miles from the Cross, was thought so outrageously
remote by the people of the compact little Edinburgh of those days,
that his friends always called it Kamtschatka, as if it lay in the
ends of the earth. But Kames and Hailes still lived in New Street, Sir
John Dalrymple and Monboddo and many other notabilities in St. John
Street, Cullen in the Mint, and Dugald Stewart in the Lothian Hut (the
town-house of the Marquis of Lothian) in the Horse Wynd.

Panmure House is still standing. It is a much more modern structure
than the houses near it, having been built towards the middle of last
century; and although its rooms are now mostly tenantless, and its
garden a cooper's yard, it wears to this day an air of spacious and
substantial comfort which is entirely wanting in the rest of the
neighbourhood. William Windham, the statesman, who dined in it
repeatedly when he was in Edinburgh with Burke in 1785, thought it a
very stately house indeed for a philosopher. "House magnificent," he
enters in his diary, "and place fine," and one can still imagine how
it would appear so when the plastered walls were yet white, and the
eye looked over the long strip of terraced garden on to the soft green
slopes of the Calton. There was then no building of any kind on or
about the Calton Hill, except the Observatory, and Dugald Stewart, who
was very fond of rural scenery, always said that the great charm of
his own house a few closes up was its view of the Calton crags and
braes.

Smith brought over his mother and his cousin, Miss Douglas, from
Kirkcaldy, and a few months later the youngest son of his cousin,
Colonel Douglas of Strathendry, who was to attend school and college
with a view to the bar, and whom he made his heir. Windham, after
visiting them, makes the same note twice in his diary, "Felt strongly
the impression