of resigning upon his return.  This notion is entirely my own, and shall never be known to Ferguson if it appear to you improper.  I shall only say that he deserves this friendly treatment by his friendly conduct of a similar kind towards poor Russell’s family.

Pray what strange accounts are these we hear of Franklyn’s conduct?  I am very slow in believing that he has been guilty in the extreme degree that is pretended, tho’ I always knew him to be a very factious man, and Faction next to Fanaticism is of all passions the most destructive of morality.  I hear that Wedderburn’s treatment of him before the Council was most cruel without being in the least blamable.  What a pity![235]

Smith’s headquarters in London, to which Hume’s letters to him were addressed, was the British Coffee-House in Cockspur Street, a great Scotch resort in last century, kept, as I have said, by a sister of his old Balliol friend, Bishop Douglas, “a woman,” according to Henry Mackenzie, “of uncommon talents and the most agreeable conversation.”  Wedderburn founded a weekly dining club in this house, which Robertson and Carlyle used to frequent when they came to town, and no doubt Smith would do the same, for many of his Scotch friends belonged to it—­Dr. William Hunter, John Home, Robert Adam the architect, and Sir Gilbert Elliot.  Indeed, though men like Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Garrick, and Richard Cumberland were members, it was predominantly a Scotch club, and both Carlyle and Richard Cumberland say an extremely agreeable one.  But during his residence at this period in London Smith was in 1775 admitted to the membership of a much more famous club, the Literary Club of Johnson and Burke and Reynolds at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street, and he no doubt attended their fortnightly dinners.  The only members present on the night of his election were Beauclerk, Gibbon, Sir William Jones, and Sir Joshua Reynolds.  Boswell, writing his friend Temple on 28th April 1776, immediately after the Wealth of Nations was published, says, “Smith too is now of our club.  It has lost its select merit.”  But another member of the club, Dean Barnard—­husband of the authoress of “Auld Robin Gray”—­appreciates his worth better, though he wrote the lines in which his appreciation occurs before the Wealth of Nations appeared, and his words may therefore be taken perhaps to convey the impression made by Smith’s conversation.  One of the Dean’s verses runs—­

    If I have thoughts and can’t express ’em,
    Gibbon shall teach me how to dress ’em
        In form select and terse;
    Jones teach me modesty and Greek,
    Smith how to think, Burke how to speak,
        And Beauclerk to converse.

Smith’s conversation seems, from all the accounts we have of it, to have been the conversation of a thinker, often lecturing rather than talk, but always instructive and solid.  William Playfair, the brother of Professor John Playfair, the mathematician, says, “Those persons who have ever had the pleasure to be in his company may recollect that even in his common conversation the order and method he pursued without the smallest degree of formality or stiffness were beautiful, and gave a sort of pleasure to all who listened to him."[236]