Still his friends were perhaps right in lamenting that the duties of this office, light though they really were, used up his time and energy too completely to permit his application to the great work on government which he had projected.  “Though they required little exertion of thought, they were yet,” says Dugald Stewart, “sufficient to waste his spirits and dissipate his attention; and now that his career is closed, it is impossible to reflect on the time they consumed without lamenting that it had not been employed in labours more profitable to the world and more equal to his mind.  During the first years of his residence in this city his studies seemed to be entirely suspended, and his passion for letters served only to amuse his leisure and to animate his conversation.  The infirmities of age, of which he very early began to feel the approach, reminded him at last, when it was too late, of what he yet owed to the public and to his own fame.  The principal materials of the works which he had announced had been long ago collected, and little probably was wanting but a few years of health and retirement to bestow on them that systematical arrangement in which he delighted."[289]

His leisure seems to have been passed during these later years of his life very largely in the study of the Greek poets, and he frequently remarked to Dugald Stewart, when found in his library with Sophocles or Euripides open before him on the table, that of all the amusements of old age, the most grateful and soothing was the renewal of acquaintance with the favourite studies and the favourite authors of our youth.[290] Besides, the work of composition seems to have grown really more arduous to him.  He was always a slow composer, and had never acquired increased facility from increased practice.  Much of his time too was now given to the enjoyments of friendship.  I have already mentioned his Sunday suppers, but besides these he founded, soon after settling in Edinburgh, in co-operation with the two friends who were his closest associates during the whole of this last period of his career—­Black the chemist, and Hutton the geologist—­a weekly dining club, which met every Friday at two o’clock in a tavern in the Grassmarket.  Dr. Swediaur, the Paris physician, who spent some time in Edinburgh in 1784 making researches along with Cullen, and was made a member of this club during his stay, writes Jeremy Bentham:  “We have a club here which consists of nothing but philosophers.  Dr. Adam Smith, Cullen, Black, Mr. M’Gowan, etc., belong to it, and I am also a member of it.  Thus I spend once a week in a most enlightened and agreeable, cheerful and social company.”  And of Smith, with whom he says he is intimately acquainted, he tells Bentham he “is quite our man”—­in opinion and tendencies, I presume.  Ferguson was a member of the club, though after being struck with paralysis in 1780 he never dined out; but among the constant attenders were Henry Mackenzie, Dugald Stewart, Professor John Playfair, Sir James Hall the geologist; Robert Adam, architect; Adam’s brother-in-law, John Clerk of Eldin, inventor of the new system of naval tactics; and Lord Daer—­the “noble youthful Daer”—­who was the first lord Burns ever met, and taught the poet that in a lord he after all but “met a brither,” with nothing uncommon about him,