advancement, was the closest surviving
friend Hamilton possessed. They had been constant companions in youth,
leading spirits of that new school of dandies called "the
beaux"--young men at once of fashion and of letters--who adorned
Scotch society between the Rebellions, and continued to adorn many an
after-dinner table in Edinburgh down till the present century.
Hamilton owns that it was Kames who first taught him "verse to
criticise," and wrote to him the poem "To H.H. at the Assembly"; while
Kames for his part used in his old age, as his neighbour Ramsay of
Ochtertyre informs us, to have no greater enjoyment than recounting
the scenes and doings he and Hamilton had transacted together in those
early days, of which the poet himself writes, when they "kept
friendship's holy vigil" in the subterranean taverns of old Edinburgh
"full many a fathom deep."

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Home and Hume, it may be mentioned, are only different ways of
spelling the same name, which, though differently spelt, was not
differently pronounced.

[20] Tytler's _Life of Kames_, i. 218.

[21] Blair's _Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres_, i. 381.

[22] Clayden's _Early Life of Samuel Rogers_, p. 168.

[23] Stewart's _Works_, ed. Hamilton, vol. x. p. 68.

[24] _Correspondence of James Oswald_, Preface.

[25] _Caldwell Papers_, i. 93.

[26] Duncan's _Notes and Documents illustrative of the Literary
History of Glasgow_, p. 25.

CHAPTER V

PROFESSOR AT GLASGOW

1751-1764. _Aet._ 27-40

The Edinburgh lectures soon bore fruit. On the death of Mr. Loudon,
Professor of Logic in Glasgow College, in 1750, Smith was appointed to
the vacant chair, and so began that period of thirteen years of active
academic work which he always looked back upon, he tells us, "as by
far the most useful and therefore by far the happiest and most
honourable period" of his life. The appointment lay with the
Senatus--or, more strictly, with a section of the Senatus known as the
Faculty Professors--some of whom, of course, had been his own teachers
ten years before, and knew him well; and the minutes state that the
choice was unanimous. He was elected on the 9th of January 1751, and
was admitted to the office on the 16th, after reading a dissertation
_De origine idearum_, signing the Westminster Confession of Faith
before the Presbytery of Glasgow, and taking the usual oath _De
fideli_ to the University authorities; but he did not begin work till
th