Townshend bore, as Hume hints, a bad character for changeability.  He was popularly nicknamed the Weathercock, and a squib of the day once reported that Mr. Townshend was ill of a pain in his side, but regretted that it was not said on which side.  But he stood firmly to his project about Smith; paid him a visit in Glasgow that very summer, saw much of him, invited him to Dalkeith House, arranged with him about the selection and despatch of a number of books for the young Duke’s study, and seems to have arrived at a general understanding with Smith that the latter should accept the tutorship when the time came.  Townshend of course delighted the Glasgow professors during this visit, as he delighted everybody, but he seems in turn to have been delighted with them, for William Hunter wrote Cullen a little later in the same year that Townshend had come back from Scotland passing the highest encomiums on everybody.  Smith seems to have acted as his chief cicerone in Glasgow, as appears from one of the trivial incidents which were all that the contemporary writers of Smith’s obituary notices seemed able to learn of his life.  He was showing Townshend the tannery, one of the spectacles of Glasgow at the time—­“an amazing sight,” Pennant calls it—­and walked in his absent way right into the tanpit, from which, however, he was immediately rescued without any harm.

In September 1759, on the death of Mr. Townshend’s brother, Smith wrote him the following letter:—­[116]

SIR—­It gives me great concern that the first letter I ever have done myself the honour to write to you should be upon so melancholy an occasion.  As your Brother was generally known here, he is universally regretted, and your friends are sorry that, amidst the public rejoicings and prosperity, your family should have occasion to be in mourning.  Everybody here remembers you with the greatest admiration and affection, and nothing that concerns you is indifferent to them, and there are more people who sympathise with you than you are aware of.  It would be the greatest pedantry to offer any topics of consolation to you who are naturally so firm and so manly.  As your Brother dyed in the service of his country, you have the best and the noblest consolation:  That since it has pleased God to deprive you of the satisfaction you might have expected from the continuance of his life, it has at least been so ordered that y^e manner of his death does you honour.

You left Scotland so much sooner than you proposed, when I had the pleasure of seeing you at Glasgow, that I had not an opportunity of making you a visit at Dalkieth (sic), as I intended, before you should return to London.

I sent about a fortnight ago the books which you ordered for the Duke of Buccleugh to Mr. Campbell at Edinburgh.[117] I paid for them, according to your orders, as soon as they were ready.  I send you enclosed a list of them, with