tructions of Black and
Hutton in disposing of the MSS. and writings, and pay an annuity of
L20 a year to Mrs. Janet Douglas, and after her death, a sum of L400
to Professor Hugh Cleghorn of St. Andrews and his wife.[374] The
property Smith left, however, was very moderate, and his friends could
not at first help expressing some surprise that it should have been so
little, because, though known to be very hospitable, he had never
maintained anything more than a moderate establishment. But they had
not then known, though many of them had long suspected, that he gave
away large sums in secret charity. William Playfair mentions that
Smith's friends, suspecting him of doing this, had sometimes in his
lifetime formed special juries for the purpose of discovering
evidences of it, but that the economist was "so ingenious in
concealing his charity" that they never could discover it from
witnesses, though they often found the strongest circumstantial
evidence of it.[375] Dugald Stewart was more fortunate. He says: "Some
very affecting instances of Mr. Smith's beneficence in cases where he
found it impossible to conceal entirely his good offices have been
mentioned to me by a near relation of his and one of his most
confidential friends, Miss Ross, daughter of the late Patrick Ross,
Esq., of Innernethy. They were all on a scale much beyond what would
have been expected from his fortune, and were combined with
circumstances equally honourable to the delicacy of his feelings and
the liberality of his heart." One recalls the saying of Sir James
Mackintosh, who was a student of Cullen and Black's in Smith's closing
years, and used occasionally to meet the economist in private society.
"I have known," said Mackintosh to Empson many years after this--"I
have known Adam Smith slightly, Ricardo well, and Malthus intimately.
Is it not something to say for a science that its three greatest
masters were about the three best men I ever knew?"[376]

Smith never sat for his picture, but nevertheless we possess excellent
portraits of him by two very talented artists who had many
opportunities of seeing and sketching him. Tassie was a student at
Foulis's Academy of Design in Glasgow College when Smith was there,
and he may possibly even then have occasionally modelled the
distinguished Professor, for we hear of models of Smith being in all
the booksellers' windows in Glasgow at that time, and these models
would, for a certainty, have been made i