It was, no doubt, this unhappy altercation that gave rise to the legendary anecdote which has obtained an immortality it ill deserved, but which cannot be passed over here, because it has been given to the world by three independent authorities of such importance as Sir Walter Scott, Lord Jeffrey, and Bishop Wilberforce.  Scott communicates the anecdote to Croker for his edition of Boswell’s Johnson, as it was told him by Professor John Millar of Glasgow, who had it from Smith himself the night the affair happened.  Wilberforce gives it ostensibly as it was heard by his father from Smith’s lips; and Jeffrey, in reviewing Wilberforce’s book in the Edinburgh Review, says he heard the story, in substantially the same form as Wilberforce tells it, nearly fifty years before, “from the mouth of one of a party into which Mr. Smith came immediately after the collision.”

The story, as told by Scott, is in this wise:[123] “Mr. Boswell has chosen to omit (in his account of Johnson’s visit to Glasgow), for reasons which will be presently obvious, that Johnson and Adam Smith met at Glasgow; but I have been assured by Professor John Millar that they did so, and that Smith, leaving the party in which he had met Johnson, happened to come to another company where Millar was.  Knowing that Smith had been in Johnson’s society, they were anxious to know what had passed, and the more so as Dr. Smith’s temper seemed much ruffled.  At first Smith would only answer, ’He’s a brute; he’s a brute;’ but on closer examination it appeared that Johnson no sooner saw Smith than he attacked him for some point of his famous letter on the death of Hume.  Smith vindicated the truth of his statement.  ’What did Johnson say?’ was the universal inquiry.  ‘Why, he said,’ replied Smith, with the deepest impression of resentment, ‘he said, You lie.’  ‘And what did you reply?’ ‘I said, You are a son of a ——!’ On such terms did these two great moralists meet and part, and such was the classical dialogue between two great teachers of philosophy.”

Wilberforce’s version is identical with Scott’s, except that it commits the absurdity of making Smith tell not the story itself, but the story of his first telling it. “‘Some of our friends,’ said Adam Smith, ’were anxious that we should meet, and a party was arranged for the purpose in the course of the evening.  I was soon after entering another society, and perhaps with a manner a little confused.  “Have you met Dr. Johnson?” my friends exclaimed.  “Yes, I have.”  “And what passed between you?"’” and so on.  All this at any rate is legendary outgrowth on the very face of it, and nonsensical even for that.  But even the story itself, as told so circumstantially by Scott, is demonstrably mythical in most of its circumstances.  Johnson was never in Glasgow except one day, the 29th of October 1773, and in October 1773 Smith was in London, and as we know from an incidental parenthesis in the Wealth of Nations,[124] engaged in the composition of