ar, according to an
anecdote preserved by Scott, which, trivial though it be, may be
repeated here, under the shelter of the great novelist's example and
of Smith's own biographical principle that nothing about a great man
is too minute not to be worth knowing.

Scott, speaking apparently as an eye-witness, says: "We shall never
forget one particular evening when he (Smith) put an elderly maiden
lady who presided at the tea-table to sore confusion by neglecting
utterly her invitation to be seated, and walking round and round the
circle, stopping ever and anon to steal a lump from the sugar basin,
which the venerable spinster was at length constrained to place on her
own knee, as the only method of securing it from his uneconomical
depredations. His appearance mumping the eternal sugar was something
indescribable." It is probably the same story Robert Chambers gives in
his _Traditions of Edinburgh_, and he makes the scene Smith's own
parlour, and the elderly spinster his cousin, Miss Jean Douglas. It
may have been so, for Scott, as a school companion of young David
Douglas, would very likely have been occasionally at Panmure House.

FOOTNOTES:

[284] Nicholson's edition of _Wealth of Nations_, p. 8.

[285] Bonar's _Catalogue of the Library of Adam Smith_, p. viii.

[286] Smellie's _Life of Smith_, p. 297.

[287] _Quarterly Review_, xxxvi. 200.

[288] _Sir J. Sinclair's Correspondence_, i. 389.

[289] Stewart's _Works_, x. 73.

[290] Stewart's _Life of Reid_, sec. iii.

[291] Sinclair's _Old Times and Distant Places_, p. 7.

[292] Stewart's _Life of Reid_, sec. iii.

[293] Black's _Works_, I. xxxii.

[294] _Transactions_, R.S.E., v. 98.

CHAPTER XXII

VARIOUS CORRESPONDENCE IN 1778

Soon after Smith settled in Edinburgh he received from his old French
friends, the Duchesse d'Enville and her son the Duc de la
Rochefoucauld, a presentation copy of a new edition of their
ancestor's _Maximes_, accompanied by the following letter from the
Duke himself, in which he informs Smith of the interesting
circumstance that, in spite of the way his famous ancestor is
mentioned in the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, he had himself at one
time undertaken a translation of that work, and only abandoned the
task when he found himself anticipated by the publication of the
translation by Abbe Blavet in 1774. It is a little curious that a
disciple of Quesnay, a regular frequenter of Mirabeau's economic
dinners, sho