ey had "a total dislike to Balliol."[17]

This idea of a transference, I may be allowed to add, continued to be
mooted, and in 1776 it was actually proposed by the heads of Balliol
to the Senatus of Glasgow to transfer the Snell foundationers
altogether to Hertford College; but the Glasgow authorities thought
this would be merely a transference of the troubles, and not a remedy
for them, that the exhibitioners would get no better welcome at
Hertford than at Balliol if they came as "fixed property" instead of
coming as volunteers, and that they could never lose their national
peculiarities of dialect and their habits of combination if they came
in a body. Accordingly, in the letter of 22nd May 1776, which I have
already quoted,[18] they recommended the arrangement of leaving each
exhibitioner to choose his own college,--an arrangement, it may be
remembered, which had just then been strongly advocated as a general
principle by Smith in his newly-published _Wealth of the Nations_, on
the broader ground that it would encourage a wholesome competition
between the colleges, and so improve the character of the instruction
given in them all.

Now if the daily relations between the Scotch exhibitioners at Balliol
and the authorities and general members of the College were of the
unhappy description partially revealed in this correspondence, that
may possibly afford some explanation of what must otherwise seem the
entirely unaccountable circumstance that Smith, so far as we are able
to judge, made almost no permanent friends at Oxford. Few men were
ever by nature more entirely formed for friendship than Smith. At
every other stage of his history we invariably find him surrounded by
troops of friends, and deriving from their company his chief solace
and delight. But here he is six or seven years at Oxford, at the
season of manhood when the deepest and most lasting friendships of a
man's life are usually made, and yet we never see him in all his
subsequent career holding an hour's intercourse by word or letter with
any single Oxford contemporary except Bishop Douglas of Salisbury, and
Bishop Douglas had been a Snell exhibitioner himself. With Douglas,
moreover, he had many other ties. Douglas was a Fifeshire man, and may
possibly have been a kinsman more or less remote; he was a friend of
Hume and Robertson, and all Smith's Edinburgh friends; and he was,
like Smith again, a member of the famous Literary Club of London, and
is cel