to a garden plot. He had
little Latin and no Greek, for he never was at college, and the
classical quotations in his _Sketches_ were translated for him by A.F.
Tytler. But he had thrown himself with all the greater zeal on that
account into English literature when English literature became the
rage in Scotland after the Union, and he was soon crossing steel with
Bishop Butler in metaphysics, and the accepted guide of the new Scotch
poets in literary criticism. Hamilton of Bangour confesses that he
himself

From Hume learned verse to criticise,

the Hume meant being his early friend, Henry Home of Kames, and not
his later friend, David Hume the historian.[19] Home's place in the
literature of Scotland corresponds with his place in its agriculture;
he was the first of the improvers; and Smith, who always held him in
the deepest veneration, was not wrong when, on being complimented on
the group of great writers who were then reflecting glory on Scotland,
he said, "Yes, but we must every one of us acknowledge Kames for our
master."[20]

When Home found Smith already as well versed in the English classics
as himself, he suggested the delivery of this course of lectures on
English literature and criticism. The subject was fresh, it was
fashionable, and though Stevenson, the Professor of Logic, had already
lectured on it, and lectured on it in English too to his class, nobody
had yet given lectures on it open to the general public, whose
interest it had at the moment so much engaged. The success of such a
course seemed assured, and the event fully justified that
prognostication. The class was attended among others by Kames himself;
by students for the bar, like Alexander Wedderburn, afterwards Lord
Chancellor of England, and William Johnstone, who long played an
influential part in Parliament as Sir William Pulteney; by young
ministers of the city like Dr. Blair, who subsequently gave a similar
course himself; and by many others, both young and old. It brought
Smith in, we are informed, a clear L100 sterling, and if we assume
that the fee was a guinea, which was a customary fee at the period,
the audience would be something better than a hundred. It was probably
held in the College, for Blair's subsequent course was delivered there
even before the establishment of any formal connection with the
University by the creation of the professorship.

The lectures Smith then delivered on English literature were burnt at
his