A virtuous palace where no monarch dwells.

The Scottish nobility had their town-houses in its gloomy courts, and great dowagers and famous generals still toiled up its cheerless stairs.  Panmure House itself had been the residence of the Panmure family before Smith occupied it, and became the residence of the Countess of Aberdeen after his death.  Most of his own more particular friends too—­the better aristocracy of letters and science—­lived about him here.  If it was to Edinburgh, as Gibbon remarks, that “taste and philosophy seemed to have retired from the smoke and hurry of the immense capital of London,” it was in the ancient smoke and leisure of the Canongate they found their sanctuary.  Robertson flitted out, indeed, to the Grange House; Black—­Smith’s special crony in this Edinburgh period—­to the present Blind Asylum in Nicolson Street, then a country villa; and Adam Ferguson to a place at the Sciennes which, though scarce two miles from the Cross, was thought so outrageously remote by the people of the compact little Edinburgh of those days, that his friends always called it Kamtschatka, as if it lay in the ends of the earth.  But Kames and Hailes still lived in New Street, Sir John Dalrymple and Monboddo and many other notabilities in St. John Street, Cullen in the Mint, and Dugald Stewart in the Lothian Hut (the town-house of the Marquis of Lothian) in the Horse Wynd.

Panmure House is still standing.  It is a much more modern structure than the houses near it, having been built towards the middle of last century; and although its rooms are now mostly tenantless, and its garden a cooper’s yard, it wears to this day an air of spacious and substantial comfort which is entirely wanting in the rest of the neighbourhood.  William Windham, the statesman, who dined in it repeatedly when he was in Edinburgh with Burke in 1785, thought it a very stately house indeed for a philosopher.  “House magnificent,” he enters in his diary, “and place fine,” and one can still imagine how it would appear so when the plastered walls were yet white, and the eye looked over the long strip of terraced garden on to the soft green slopes of the Calton.  There was then no building of any kind on or about the Calton Hill, except the Observatory, and Dugald Stewart, who was very fond of rural scenery, always said that the great charm of his own house a few closes up was its view of the Calton crags and braes.

Smith brought over his mother and his cousin, Miss Douglas, from Kirkcaldy, and a few months later the youngest son of his cousin, Colonel Douglas of Strathendry, who was to attend school and college with a view to the bar, and whom he made his heir.  Windham, after visiting them, makes the same note twice in his diary, “Felt strongly the impression of a family completely Scotch.”  Smith’s house was noted for its simple and unpretending hospitality.  He liked to have his friends about him without the formality of an invitation, and few strangers of distinction