t shade of envy, it would be hard to find an example where
everything favourable to good society was more perfectly united, and
everything adverse more entirely excluded."[292] This friendship of
Smith, Black, and Hutton, if not so famous as the friendship between
Smith and Hume, was not less really memorable. Each of them had
founded--or done more than any other single person to found--a
science; they may be called the fathers of modern chemistry, of modern
geology, and of modern political economy; and for all their great
achievements, they were yet men of the most unaffected simplicity of
character. In other respects they were very different from one
another, but their differences only knit them closer together, and
made them more interesting to their friends.

Black was a man of fine presence and courtly bearing, grave, calm,
polished, well dressed, speaking, what was then rare, correct English
without a trace of Scotch accent, and always with sense and insight
even in fields beyond his own. Smith used to say that he never knew a
man with less nonsense in him than Dr. Black, and that he was often
indebted to his better discrimination in the judgment of character, a
point in which Smith, not only by the general testimony of his
acquaintance, but by his own confession, was by no means strong,
inasmuch as he was, as he acknowledges, too apt to form his opinion
from a single feature. Now the judgment of character was, according to
Robison, Black's very strongest point. "Indeed," says Robison, "were I
to say what natural talent Dr. Black possessed in the most uncommon
degree, I should say it was his judgment of human character, and a
talent which he had of expressing his opinion in a single short
phrase, which fixed it in the mind never to be forgotten."[293] He was
a very brilliant lecturer, for Brougham, who had been one of his
students, said that he had heard Pitt and Fox and Plunket, but for
mere intellectual gratification he should prefer sitting again on the
old benches of the chemistry classroom, "while the first philosopher
of his age was the historian of his own discoveries"; and, adored as
he was by his students, he was the object of scarce less veneration
and pride to the whole body of his fellow-citizens. Lord Cockburn
tells us how even the wildest boys used to respect Black. "No lad,"
says he, "could ever be irreverent towards a man so pale, so gentle,
so elegant, and so illustrious."

Hutton was in many re