right, its 23 barons on the left, and the third estate—­representatives of 23 chief towns and 23 dioceses—­in the centre, and on a dais in front of all, the President, the Archbishop of Narbonne.  The Archbishop, to whom, it will be remembered, Smith asked, and no doubt received, a letter of introduction from Lord Hertford, was a countryman of his own, Cardinal Dillon, a prince of prelates, afterwards Minister of France; a strong champion of the rights of the States against the pretensions of the Crown, and, if we may judge from the speech with which Miss Knight heard him open the States of Languedoc in 1776, a very thorough free-trader.

With all these excursions, Smith was now evidently realising in some reasonable measure the “gayetty and amusement” he told Hume he anticipated to enjoy during the rest of his stay in the South of France.  His command of the language, too, grew easier, though it never became perfect, and he not only went more into society, but was able to enjoy it better.  Among those he saw most of in Toulouse were, he used to tell Stewart, the presidents and counsellors of the Parliament, who were noted, like their class in other parliament towns, for their hospitality, and noted above those of other parliament towns for keeping up the old tradition of blending their law with a love of letters.  They were men, moreover, of proved patriotism and independence; in no other society would Smith be likely to hear more of the oppressed condition of the peasantry, and the necessity for thoroughgoing reforms.  In those days the king’s edict did not run in a province till it was registered by the local parliament, and the Parliament of Toulouse often used this privilege of theirs to check bad measures.  They had in 1756 remonstrated with the king against the corvee, declaring that the condition of the peasantry of France was “a thousand times less tolerable than the condition of the slaves in America.”  At the very moment of Smith’s first arrival in Toulouse they were all thrown in prison—­or at least put under arrest in their own houses—­for refusing to register the centieme denier, and Smith no doubt had that circumstance in his mind when he animadverted in the Wealth of Nations on the violence practised by the French Government to coerce its parliaments.  He thought very highly of those parliaments as institutions, stating that though not very convenient courts of law, they had never been accused or even suspected of corruption, and he gives a curious reason for their incorruptibility; it was because they were not paid by salary, but by fees dependent on their diligence.