Except for the great resource of study, Smith’s life at Oxford seems not to have been a very happy one.  For one thing, he was in poor health and spirits a considerable part of the time, as appears from the brief extracts from his letters published by Lord Brougham.  When Brougham was writing his account of Smith he got the use of a number of letters written by the latter to his mother from Oxford between 1740 and 1746, which probably exist somewhere still, but which, he found, contained nothing of any general interest.  “They are almost all,” he says, “upon mere family and personal matters, most of them indeed upon his linen and other such necessaries, but all show his strong affection for his mother.”  The very brief extracts Brougham makes from them, however, inform us that Smith was then suffering from what he calls “an inveterate scurvy and shaking in the head,” for which he was using the new remedy of tar-water which Bishop Berkeley had made the fashionable panacea for all manner of diseases.  At the end of July 1744 Smith says to his mother:  “I am quite inexcusable for not writing to you oftener.  I think of you every day, but always defer writing till the post is just going, and then sometimes business or company, but oftener laziness, hinders me.  Tar-water is a remedy very much in vogue here at present for almost all diseases.  It has perfectly cured me of an inveterate scurvy and shaking in the head.  I wish you’d try it.  I fancy it might be of service to you.”  In another and apparently subsequent letter, however, he states that he had had the scurvy and shaking as long as he remembered anything, and that the tar-water had not removed them.  On the 29th of November 1743 he makes the curious confession:  “I am just recovered from a violent fit of laziness, which has confined me to my elbow-chair these three months."[14] Brougham thinks these statements show symptoms of hypochondria; but they probably indicate no more than the ordinary lassitude and exhaustion ensuing from overwork.  Hume, when about the same age, had by four or five years’ hard reading thrown himself into a like condition, and makes the same complaints of “laziness of temper” and scurvy.  The shaking in the head continued to attend Smith all his days.

But low health was only one of the miseries of his estate at Oxford.  There is reason to believe that Balliol College was in his day a stepmother to her Scotch sons, and that their existence there was made very uncomfortable not merely at the hands of the mob of young gentlemen among whom they were obliged to live, but even more by the unfair and discriminating harshness of the College authorities themselves.  Out of the hundred students then residing at Balliol, eight at least were Scotch, four on the Snell foundation and four on the Warner, and the Scotch eight seem to have been always treated as an alien and intrusive faction.  The Snell exhibitioners were continually complaining to the Glasgow Senatus on the subject,