_, ii. 216.

[15] Letter from Senatus of Glasgow College to Balliol College, in
Laing MSS., Edinburgh University.

[16] Letter of A.G. Ross of Gray's Inn to Professor R. Simson,
Glasgow, in Edinburgh University Library.

[17] Laing MSS., Edinburgh University.

[18] Edinburgh University Library.

CHAPTER IV

LECTURER AT EDINBURGH

1748-1750. _Aet._ 25-27

In returning to Scotland Smith's ideas were probably fixed from the
first on a Scotch university chair as an eventual acquisition, but he
thought in the meantime to obtain employment of the sort he afterwards
gave up his chair to take with the Duke of Buccleugh, a travelling
tutorship with a young man of rank and wealth, then a much-desired
and, according to the standard of the times, a highly-remunerated
occupation. While casting about for a place of that kind he stayed at
home with his mother in Kirkcaldy, and he had to remain there without
any regular employment for two full years, from the autumn of 1746
till the autumn of 1748. The appointment never came; because from his
absent manner and bad address, we are told, he seemed to the ordinary
parental mind a most unsuitable person to be entrusted with the care
of spirited and perhaps thoughtless young gentlemen. But the visits he
paid to Edinburgh in pursuit of this work bore fruit by giving him
quite as good a start in life, and a much shorter cut to the
professorial position for which he was best fitted. During the winter
of 1748-49 he made a most successful beginning as a public lecturer by
delivering a course on the then comparatively untried subject of
English literature, and gave at the same time a first contribution to
English literature himself by collecting and editing the poems of
William Hamilton of Bangour. For both these undertakings he was
indebted to the advice and good offices of Lord Kames, or, as he then
was, Mr. Henry Home, one of the leaders of the Edinburgh bar, with
whom he was made acquainted, we may safely assume, by his friend and
neighbour, James Oswald of Dunnikier, whom we know to have been among
Kames's most intimate friends and correspondents. Kames, though now
fifty-two, had not yet written any of the works which raised him
afterwards to eminence, but he had long enjoyed in the literary
society of the North something of that position which Voltaire laughs
at him for trying to take towards the world in general; he was a law
on all questions of taste, from an epic poem