llen, Black, Mr. M'Gowan, etc., belong to it, and I am also a member
of it. Thus I spend once a week in a most enlightened and agreeable,
cheerful and social company." And of Smith, with whom he says he is
intimately acquainted, he tells Bentham he "is quite our man"--in
opinion and tendencies, I presume. Ferguson was a member of the club,
though after being struck with paralysis in 1780 he never dined out;
but among the constant attenders were Henry Mackenzie, Dugald Stewart,
Professor John Playfair, Sir James Hall the geologist; Robert Adam,
architect; Adam's brother-in-law, John Clerk of Eldin, inventor of the
new system of naval tactics; and Lord Daer--the "noble youthful
Daer"--who was the first lord Burns ever met, and taught the poet that
in a lord he after all but "met a brither," with nothing uncommon
about him,

Except good sense and social glee,
An' (what surprised me) modesty.

Lord Daer was the eldest son of the fourth Earl of Selkirk, and, on
the outbreak of the French Revolution, a few years after Burns met
him, became one of the most ardent of the "Friends of the People"; and
was intimate with Mirabeau, to whom he ventured to speak a word for
the king's safety, and was told that the French would not commit the
English blunder of cutting off their king's head, because that was the
usual way to establish a despotism.[291] Great expectations were
cherished of Lord Daer's future, but they were defeated by his
premature death in 1794. The Mr. M'Gowan mentioned by Swediaur is
little known now, but he was an antiquary and naturalist, a friend and
correspondent of Shenstone, Pennant, and Bishop Percy. M'Gowan kept
house with a friend of his youth, who had returned to him after long
political exile, Andrew Lumisden, Prince Charlie's Secretary, who was
also a warm friend of Smith, and whose portrait by Tassie is one of
the few relics of Smith's household effects which still exist.
Lumisden had been Hamilton of Bangour's companion in exile at Rouen,
and was no doubt also a member of this club.

According to Playfair, the chief delight of the club was to listen to
the conversation of its three founders. "As all the three possessed
great talents, enlarged views, and extensive information, without any
of the stateliness and formality which men of letters think it
sometimes necessary to affect, as they were all three easily amused,
and as the sincerity of their friendship had never been darkened by
the leas