of, and especially on his _Ode to the
Cuckoo_, which he has been accused so often of stealing from his
deceased friend Michael Bruce, but to which his title has at last been
put beyond all doubt by Mr. Small's publication of a letter, written
to Principal Baird in 1791, by Dr. Robertson of Dalmeny, who acted as
joint editor with him of their common friend Bruce's poems.[338]

FOOTNOTES:

[327] Bisset's _Life of Burke_, ii. 429.

[328] Bisset's _Life of Burke_, ii. 429.

[329] Innes's Memoir of Dalzel in Dalzel's _History of University of
Edinburgh_, i. 42.

[330] Add. MSS., 32,567.

[331] Best's _Anecdotes_, p. 25.

[332] Clayden's _Early Life of Samuel Rogers_, p. 92.

[333] Dalzel's _History of the University of Edinburgh_, i. 42.

[334] Edinburgh University Library.

[335] See above, p. 361.

[336] See above, p. 243.

[337] Morrison MSS.

[338] Small, _Michael Bruce and the Ode to the Cuckoo_, p. 7.

CHAPTER XXVIII

THE POPULATION QUESTION

Dr. Richard Price had recently stirred a sensation by his attempt to
prove that the population of England was declining, and had actually
declined by nearly 30 per cent since the Revolution, and the first to
enter the lists against him was William Eden, who in his _Fifth Letter
to the Earl of Carlisle_, published in 1780, exposes the weakness of
Price's statistics, and argues that both the population and the trade
of the country had increased. Price replied to these criticisms in the
same year, and now in 1785 Eden appears to have been contemplating a
return to the subject and the publication of another work upon it, in
connection with which he entered upon a correspondence with Smith, for
the two following letters bearing on this population question of last
century, though neither of them bears any name or address, seem most
likely to have been written to that politician.

Price had drawn his alarmist conclusions from rough estimates founded
on the revenue returns. From a comparison of the hearth-money returns
before the Revolution with the window and house tax returns of his own
time he guessed at the number of dwelling-houses in the country, and
from the number of dwelling-houses he guessed at the number of
inhabitants by simply supposing each house to contain five persons. He
further tried to support his conclusion by figures drawn from bills of
mortality and by references to colonial emigration, consolidation of
farms, the growth of London, a