IN EDINBURGH
1778-1790. _Aet._ 55-67
On settling in Edinburgh Smith took a house in the Canongate--Panmure
House, at the foot of Panmure Close, one of the steep and narrow wynds
that descend from the north side of the Canongate towards the base of
the Calton Hill; and this house was his home for the rest of his days,
and in it he died. The Canongate--the old Court end of the Scottish
capital--was still at the close of last century the fashionable
residential quarter of the city, although Holyrood had then long lain
deserted--as Hamilton of Bangour called it,
A virtuous palace where no monarch dwells.
The Scottish nobility had their town-houses in its gloomy courts, and
great dowagers and famous generals still toiled up its cheerless
stairs. Panmure House itself had been the residence of the Panmure
family before Smith occupied it, and became the residence of the
Countess of Aberdeen after his death. Most of his own more particular
friends too--the better aristocracy of letters and science--lived
about him here. If it was to Edinburgh, as Gibbon remarks, that "taste
and philosophy seemed to have retired from the smoke and hurry of the
immense capital of London," it was in the ancient smoke and leisure of
the Canongate they found their sanctuary. Robertson flitted out,
indeed, to the Grange House; Black--Smith's special crony in this
Edinburgh period--to the present Blind Asylum in Nicolson Street, then
a country villa; and Adam Ferguson to a place at the Sciennes which,
though scarce two miles from the Cross, was thought so outrageously
remote by the people of the compact little Edinburgh of those days,
that his friends always called it Kamtschatka, as if it lay in the
ends of the earth. But Kames and Hailes still lived in New Street, Sir
John Dalrymple and Monboddo and many other notabilities in St. John
Street, Cullen in the Mint, and Dugald Stewart in the Lothian Hut (the
town-house of the Marquis of Lothian) in the Horse Wynd.
Panmure House is still standing. It is a much more modern structure
than the houses near it, having been built towards the middle of last
century; and although its rooms are now mostly tenantless, and its
garden a cooper's yard, it wears to this day an air of spacious and
substantial comfort which is entirely wanting in the rest of the
neighbourhood. William Windham, the statesman, who dined in it
repeatedly when he was in Edinburgh with Burke in 1785, thought it a
very stately house indeed for a philosopher. "House magnificent," he
enters in his diary, "and place fine," and one can still imagine how
it would appear so when the plastered walls were yet white, and the
eye looked over the long strip of terraced garden on to the soft green
slopes of the Calton. There was then no building of any kind on or
about the Calton Hill, except the Observatory, and Dugald Stewart, who
was very fond of rural scenery, always said that the great charm of
his own house a few closes up was its view of the Calton crags and
braes.
Smith brought over his mother and his cousin, Miss Douglas, from
Kirkcaldy, and a few months later the youngest son of his cousin,
Colonel Douglas of Strathendry, who was to attend school and college
with a view to the bar, and whom he made his heir. Windham, after
visiting them, makes the same note twice in his diary, "Felt strongly
the impression of a family completely Scotch." Smith's house was
noted for its simple and unpretending hospitality. He liked to have
his friends about him without the formality of an invitation, and few
strangers of distinction visited Edinburgh without being entertained
in Panmure House. His Sunday suppers were still remembered and spoken
of in Edinburgh when M'Culloch lived there as a young man. Scotch
Sabbatarianism had not at that time reached the rigour that came in
with the evangelical revival in the beginning of this century, and the
Sunday supper was a regular Edinburgh institution. Even the
Evangelical leaders patronised it. Lord Cockburn and Mrs. Somerville
both speak with very agreeable recollections of the Sunday supper
parties of the Rev. Sir Harry Moncreiff, and Boswell mentions being
invited to one by another Evangelical leader, Dr. Alexander Webster.
His mother, his friends, his books--these were Smith's three great
joys. He had a library of about 3000 volumes, as varied a collection
in point of subject-matter as it would be possible to find. Professor
Shield Nicholson, who saw a large portion of it, says: "I was most
struck by the large number of books of travel and of poetry, of some
of which there were more than one edition, and occasionally _éditions
de luxe_. I had hoped to find marginal notes or references which might
have thrown light on the authorities of some passages in the _Wealth
of Nations_ (for Smith gives no references), but even the ingenious
oft-quoted author of the _Tracts on the Corn Laws_ has escaped without
a mark. At the same time pamphlets have been carefully bound together
and indexes prefixed in Smith's own writing."[284]
Mr. James Bonar has been able to collect a list of probably two-thirds
of Smith's books--about 1000 books, or 2200 volumes.[285] Nearly a
third of the whole are in French, another third in Latin, Greek, and
Italian, and a little more than a third in English. According to Mr.
Bonar's analysis, a fifth of them were on Literature and Art; a fifth
were Latin and Greek classics; a fifth on Law, Politics, and
Biography; a fifth on Political Economy and History; and the remaining
fifth on Science and Philosophy. One cannot help remarking, as an
indication of the economist's tastes, the almost complete absence of
works in theology and prose fiction. Hume's _Dialogues on Natural
Religion_ and Pascal's _Pensées_ belong as much to philosophy as
theology; Jeremy Taylor's _Antiquitates Christianae_, Father Paul
Sarpi's _History of the Council of Trent_, and Ruchat's _Histoire de
la Reformation de la Suisse_ belong as much to history; and except
these the only representatives of theology on Smith's shelves were the
English Bible, Watson's edition, 1722--probably his parents' family
Bible--a French translation of the Koran, and Van Maestricht's
_Theologia_. The only sermons, except those of Massillon in French,
are the _Sermons of Mr. Yorick_. Those sermons, however, were the only
representative of Sterne. Goldsmith was represented by his poems, but
not by his fiction; and Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, and Smollett were
not represented at all. One or two French novels were there, but
except Gulliver, which came in with the complete edition of Swift's
works in 1784, the only English novel Smith seems to have possessed
was the _Man of the World_, by his friend Henry Mackenzie. It is
perhaps stranger that he ignored the novel than that he ignored
theology, for the novel was then a very rising and popular literary
form, and Smith began life as a professed literary critic. His mind
seems to have been too positive to care much for tales. On the other
hand, of the Greek and Latin classics he not unfrequently had several
different editions. He had eight, for example, of _Horace_, who seems
to have been an especial favourite.
Like most men who are fond of books, he seems to have bound them well,
and often elegantly. Smellie, the printer, says that the first time he
happened to be in Smith's library he was "looking at the books with
some degree of curiosity, and perhaps surprise, for most of the
volumes were elegantly, and some of them superbly bound," when Smith,
observing him, said, "You must have remarked that I am a beau in
nothing but my books."[286] M'Culloch, however, who had seen the
books, doubts whether their condition warranted the account given of
them by Smellie, and says that while they were neatly, and in some
cases even elegantly bound, he saw few or none of which the binding
could with propriety be called superb.
The Custom House was on the upper floors of the Royal Exchange, in
Exchange Square, off the High Street; and Kay, standing in his shop
over at the corner of the Parliament Close, must often have seen Smith
walk past from his house to his office in the morning exactly as he
has depicted him in one of his portraits,--in a light-coloured coat,
probably linen; knee-breeches, white silk stockings, buckle shoes, and
flat broad-brimmed beaver hat; walking erect with a bunch of flowers
in his left hand, and his cane, held by the middle, borne on his right
shoulder, as Smellie tells us was Smith's usual habit, "as a soldier
carries his musket." When he walked his head always moved gently from
side to side, and his body swayed, Smellie says, "vermicularly," as if
at each alternate step "he meant to alter his direction, or even to
turn back." Often, moreover, his lips would be moving all the while,
and smiling in rapt conversation with invisible companions. A very
noticeable figure he was as he went up and down the High Street, and
he used to tell himself the observations of two market women about him
as he marched past them one day. "Hegh sirs!" said one, shaking her
head significantly. "And he's weel put on too!" rejoined the other,
surprised that one who appeared from his dress to be likely to have
friends should be left by them to walk abroad alone.
There were five Commissioners in the Scotch Board of Customs, but
Smith's colleagues were none of them men of any public reputation at
the time, and they are now mere names; but the name of the Secretary
of the Board, R.E. Phillips, may be mentioned for the circumstance
that, after living to the great age of 104, he was buried--for what
reason I know not--in the same grave with Adam Smith in Canongate
Churchyard. The business of the office was mostly of a routine and
simple character: considering appeals from merchants against the local
collector's assessments; the appointment of a new officer here, the
suppression of one there; a report on a projected colliery; a plan for
a lighthouse, a petition from a wine importer, or the owner of a
bounty sloop; a representation about the increase of illicit trade in
Orkney, or the appearance of smuggling vessels in the Minch; the
despatch of troops to repress illegal practices at some distillery, or
to watch a suspected part of the coast; the preparation of the annual
returns of income and expenditure, the payment of salaries, and
transmission of the balance to the Treasury.
Smith attended to those duties with uncommon diligence; he says
himself, in his letter to the Principal of Glasgow College in 1787 on
his appointment to the Rectorship, that he was so regular an attendant
at the Custom House that he could "take the play for a week at any
time" without giving offence or provoking comment. He was evidently a
very conscientious and on the whole, no doubt, a satisfactory
administrator, though he may have been in some things slower than a
clerk bred to business would have been, and caused occasionally a
ludicrous mistake through his incidental absence of mind. Sir Walter
Scott relates two anecdotes illustrative of that weakness, on the
authority of one of Smith's colleagues on the Board of Customs. Having
one day to sign an official document as Commissioner, Smith, instead
of signing his own name, wrote an imitation of the signature of the
Commissioner who had written before him. The other story, though,
possibly enough, embellished unconsciously by the teller in some
details, is yet of too distinct and peculiar a character to be easily
rejected, and for the same reason will best be given in Scott's own
words:--
"That Board (the Board of Customs) had in their service as porter a
stately person, who, dressed in a huge scarlet gown or cloak covered
with frogs of worsted lace, and holding in his hand a staff about
seven feet high as an emblem of his office, used to mount guard before
the Custom House when a Board was to be held. It was the etiquette
that as each Commissioner entered the porter should go through a sort
of salute with his staff of office, resembling that which officers
used formerly to perform through their spontoon, and then marshal the
dignitary to the hall of meeting. This ceremony had been performed
before the great economist perhaps five hundred times. Nevertheless
one day, as he was about to enter the Custom House, the motions of
this janitor seem to have attracted his eye without their character or
purpose reaching his apprehension, and on a sudden he began to imitate
his gestures as a recruit does those of his drill serjeant. The porter
having drawn up in front of the door, presented his staff as a soldier
does his musket. The Commissioner, raising his cane and holding it
with both hands by the middle, returned the salute with the utmost
gravity. The inferior officer, much annoyed, levelled his weapon,
wheeled to the right, stepping a pace back to give the Commissioner
room to pass, lowering his staff at the same time in token of
obeisance. Dr. Smith, instead of passing on, drew up on the opposite
side and lowered his cane to the same angle. The functionary, much out
of consequence, next moved upstairs with his staff upraised, while the
author of the _Wealth of Nations_ followed with his bamboo in
precisely the same posture, and his whole soul apparently wrapped in
the purpose of placing his foot exactly on the same spot of each step
which had been occupied by the officer who preceded him. At the door
of the hall the porter again drew off, saluted with his staff, and
bowed reverentially. The philosopher again imitated his motions, and
returned his bow with the most profound gravity. When the Doctor
entered the apartment the spell under which he seemed to act was
entirely broken, and our informant, who, very much amused, had
followed him the whole way, had some difficulty to convince him that
he had been doing anything extraordinary."[287]
This inability to recollect in a completely waking state what had
taken place during the morbid one separates this story from all the
rest that are told of Smith's absence of mind. For his friends used
always to observe of his fits of abstraction what a remarkable faculty
he possessed of recovering, when he came to himself, long portions of
the conversation that had been going on around him while his mind was
absent. But here there is an entire break between the one state and
the other; the case seems more allied to trance, though it doubtless
had the same origin as the more ordinary fits of absence, and, like
them, was only one of the penalties of that power of profound and
prolonged concentration to which the world owes so much; it was
thinker's cramp, if I may use the expression. In one way Smith took
more interest in his official work than ordinary Commissioners would
do, because he found it useful to his economic studies. In 1778 he
wrote Sir John Sinclair, who had desired a loan of the French inquiry
entitled _Mémoires concernant les Impositions_, that "he had frequent
occasion to consult the book himself both in the course of his private
studies and in the business of his present employment," and Sir John
states that Smith used to admit "that he derived great advantage from
the practical information he derived by means of his official
situation, and that he would not have otherwise known or believed how
essential practical knowledge was to the thorough understanding of
political subjects."[288] This is confirmed by the fact that most of
the additions and corrections introduced into the third edition of the
_Wealth of Nations_--the first published after his settlement in the
Customs--are connected with that branch of the public service.
Still his friends were perhaps right in lamenting that the duties of
this office, light though they really were, used up his time and
energy too completely to permit his application to the great work on
government which he had projected. "Though they required little
exertion of thought, they were yet," says Dugald Stewart, "sufficient
to waste his spirits and dissipate his attention; and now that his
career is closed, it is impossible to reflect on the time they
consumed without lamenting that it had not been employed in labours
more profitable to the world and more equal to his mind. During the
first years of his residence in this city his studies seemed to be
entirely suspended, and his passion for letters served only to amuse
his leisure and to animate his conversation. The infirmities of age,
of which he very early began to feel the approach, reminded him at
last, when it was too late, of what he yet owed to the public and to
his own fame. The principal materials of the works which he had
announced had been long ago collected, and little probably was wanting
but a few years of health and retirement to bestow on them that
systematical arrangement in which he delighted."[289]
His leisure seems to have been passed during these later years of his
life very largely in the study of the Greek poets, and he frequently
remarked to Dugald Stewart, when found in his library with Sophocles
or Euripides open before him on the table, that of all the amusements
of old age, the most grateful and soothing was the renewal of
acquaintance with the favourite studies and the favourite authors of
our youth.[290] Besides, the work of composition seems to have grown
really more arduous to him. He was always a slow composer, and had
never acquired increased facility from increased practice. Much of his
time too was now given to the enjoyments of friendship. I have already
mentioned his Sunday suppers, but besides these he founded, soon after
settling in Edinburgh, in co-operation with the two friends who were
his closest associates during the whole of this last period of his
career--Black the chemist, and Hutton the geologist--a weekly dining
club, which met every Friday at two o'clock in a tavern in the
Grassmarket. Dr. Swediaur, the Paris physician, who spent some time in
Edinburgh in 1784 making researches along with Cullen, and was made a
member of this club during his stay, writes Jeremy Bentham: "We have a
club here which consists of nothing but philosophers. Dr. Adam Smith,
Cullen, Black, Mr. M'Gowan, etc., belong to it, and I am also a member
of it. Thus I spend once a week in a most enlightened and agreeable,
cheerful and social company." And of Smith, with whom he says he is
intimately acquainted, he tells Bentham he "is quite our man"--in
opinion and tendencies, I presume. Ferguson was a member of the club,
though after being struck with paralysis in 1780 he never dined out;
but among the constant attenders were Henry Mackenzie, Dugald Stewart,
Professor John Playfair, Sir James Hall the geologist; Robert Adam,
architect; Adam's brother-in-law, John Clerk of Eldin, inventor of the
new system of naval tactics; and Lord Daer--the "noble youthful
Daer"--who was the first lord Burns ever met, and taught the poet that
in a lord he after all but "met a brither," with nothing uncommon
about him,
Except good sense and social glee,
An' (what surprised me) modesty.
Lord Daer was the eldest son of the fourth Earl of Selkirk, and, on
the outbreak of the French Revolution, a few years after Burns met
him, became one of the most ardent of the "Friends of the People"; and
was intimate with Mirabeau, to whom he ventured to speak a word for
the king's safety, and was told that the French would not commit the
English blunder of cutting off their king's head, because that was the
usual way to establish a despotism.[291] Great expectations were
cherished of Lord Daer's future, but they were defeated by his
premature death in 1794. The Mr. M'Gowan mentioned by Swediaur is
little known now, but he was an antiquary and naturalist, a friend and
correspondent of Shenstone, Pennant, and Bishop Percy. M'Gowan kept
house with a friend of his youth, who had returned to him after long
political exile, Andrew Lumisden, Prince Charlie's Secretary, who was
also a warm friend of Smith, and whose portrait by Tassie is one of
the few relics of Smith's household effects which still exist.
Lumisden had been Hamilton of Bangour's companion in exile at Rouen,
and was no doubt also a member of this club.
According to Playfair, the chief delight of the club was to listen to
the conversation of its three founders. "As all the three possessed
great talents, enlarged views, and extensive information, without any
of the stateliness and formality which men of letters think it
sometimes necessary to affect, as they were all three easily amused,
and as the sincerity of their friendship had never been darkened by
the least shade of envy, it would be hard to find an example where
everything favourable to good society was more perfectly united, and
everything adverse more entirely excluded."[292] This friendship of
Smith, Black, and Hutton, if not so famous as the friendship between
Smith and Hume, was not less really memorable. Each of them had
founded--or done more than any other single person to found--a
science; they may be called the fathers of modern chemistry, of modern
geology, and of modern political economy; and for all their great
achievements, they were yet men of the most unaffected simplicity of
character. In other respects they were very different from one
another, but their differences only knit them closer together, and
made them more interesting to their friends.
Black was a man of fine presence and courtly bearing, grave, calm,
polished, well dressed, speaking, what was then rare, correct English
without a trace of Scotch accent, and always with sense and insight
even in fields beyond his own. Smith used to say that he never knew a
man with less nonsense in him than Dr. Black, and that he was often
indebted to his better discrimination in the judgment of character, a
point in which Smith, not only by the general testimony of his
acquaintance, but by his own confession, was by no means strong,
inasmuch as he was, as he acknowledges, too apt to form his opinion
from a single feature. Now the judgment of character was, according to
Robison, Black's very strongest point. "Indeed," says Robison, "were I
to say what natural talent Dr. Black possessed in the most uncommon
degree, I should say it was his judgment of human character, and a
talent which he had of expressing his opinion in a single short
phrase, which fixed it in the mind never to be forgotten."[293] He was
a very brilliant lecturer, for Brougham, who had been one of his
students, said that he had heard Pitt and Fox and Plunket, but for
mere intellectual gratification he should prefer sitting again on the
old benches of the chemistry classroom, "while the first philosopher
of his age was the historian of his own discoveries"; and, adored as
he was by his students, he was the object of scarce less veneration
and pride to the whole body of his fellow-citizens. Lord Cockburn
tells us how even the wildest boys used to respect Black. "No lad,"
says he, "could ever be irreverent towards a man so pale, so gentle,
so elegant, and so illustrious."
Hutton was in many respects the reverse of Black. He was a dweller
out of doors, a man of strong vitality and high spirits, careless of
dress and appearance, setting little store by the world's prejudices
or fashions, and speaking the broadest Scotch, but overflowing with
views and speculations and fun, and with a certain originality of
expression, often very piquant. Every face brightened, says Playfair,
when Hutton entered a room. He had been bred a doctor, though he never
practised, but, devoting himself to agriculture, had been for years
one of the leading improvers of the Border counties, and is said,
indeed, to have been the first man in Scotland to plough with a pair
of horses and no driver, the old eight-ox plough being then in
universal use. Between his early chemical studies and his later
agricultural pursuits, his curiosity was deeply aroused as he walked
about the fields and dales, not merely concerning the composition but
the origin of the soils and rocks and minerals that lay in the crust
of the globe, and he never ceased examining and speculating till he
completed his theory of the earth which became a new starting-point
for all subsequent geological research. He was a bold investigator,
and Playfair distinguishes him finely in this respect from Black by
remarking that "Dr. Black hated nothing so much as error, and Dr.
Hutton nothing so much as ignorance. The one was always afraid of
going beyond the truth, and the other of not reaching it." He went
little into general society, but Playfair says that in the more
private circles which he preferred he was the most delightful of
companions.
The conversation of the club was often, as was to be expected from its
composition, scientific, but Professor Playfair says it was always
free, and never didactic or disputatious, and that "as the club was
much the resort of the strangers who visited Edinburgh from any
objects connected with art or with science, it derived from them an
extraordinary degree of vivacity and interest."[294]
Its name was the Oyster Club, and it may be thought from that
circumstance that those great philosophers did not spurn the delights
of more ordinary mortals. But probably no three men could be found who
cared less for the pleasures of the table. Hutton was an abstainer;
Black a vegetarian, his usual fare being "some bread, a few prunes,
and a measured quantity of milk diluted with water"; and as for Smith,
his only weakness seems to have been for lump sugar, according to an
anecdote preserved by Scott, which, trivial though it be, may be
repeated here, under the shelter of the great novelist's example and
of Smith's own biographical principle that nothing about a great man
is too minute not to be worth knowing.
Scott, speaking apparently as an eye-witness, says: "We shall never
forget one particular evening when he (Smith) put an elderly maiden
lady who presided at the tea-table to sore confusion by neglecting
utterly her invitation to be seated, and walking round and round the
circle, stopping ever and anon to steal a lump from the sugar basin,
which the venerable spinster was at length constrained to place on her
own knee, as the only method of securing it from his uneconomical
depredations. His appearance mumping the eternal sugar was something
indescribable." It is probably the same story Robert Chambers gives in
his _Traditions of Edinburgh_, and he makes the scene Smith's own
parlour, and the elderly spinster his cousin, Miss Jean Douglas. It
may have been so, for Scott, as a school companion of young David
Douglas, would very likely have been occasionally at Panmure House.
FOOTNOTES:
[284] Nicholson's edition of _Wealth of Nations_, p. 8.
[285] Bonar's _Catalogue of the Library of Adam Smith_, p. viii.
[286] Smellie's _Life of Smith_, p. 297.
[287] _Quarterly Review_, xxxvi. 200.
[288] _Sir J. Sinclair's Correspondence_, i. 389.
[289] Stewart's _Works_, x. 73.
[290] Stewart's _Life of Reid_, sec. iii.
[291] Sinclair's _Old Times and Distant Places_, p. 7.
[292] Stewart's _Life of Reid_, sec. iii.
[293] Black's _Works_, I. xxxii.
[294] _Transactions_, R.S.E., v. 98.