Except good sense and social glee,
    An’ (what surprised me) modesty.

Lord Daer was the eldest son of the fourth Earl of Selkirk, and, on the outbreak of the French Revolution, a few years after Burns met him, became one of the most ardent of the “Friends of the People”; and was intimate with Mirabeau, to whom he ventured to speak a word for the king’s safety, and was told that the French would not commit the English blunder of cutting off their king’s head, because that was the usual way to establish a despotism.[291] Great expectations were cherished of Lord Daer’s future, but they were defeated by his premature death in 1794.  The Mr. M’Gowan mentioned by Swediaur is little known now, but he was an antiquary and naturalist, a friend and correspondent of Shenstone, Pennant, and Bishop Percy.  M’Gowan kept house with a friend of his youth, who had returned to him after long political exile, Andrew Lumisden, Prince Charlie’s Secretary, who was also a warm friend of Smith, and whose portrait by Tassie is one of the few relics of Smith’s household effects which still exist.  Lumisden had been Hamilton of Bangour’s companion in exile at Rouen, and was no doubt also a member of this club.

According to Playfair, the chief delight of the club was to listen to the conversation of its three founders.  “As all the three possessed great talents, enlarged views, and extensive information, without any of the stateliness and formality which men of letters think it sometimes necessary to affect, as they were all three easily amused, and as the sincerity of their friendship had never been darkened by the least shade of envy, it would be hard to find an example where everything favourable to good society was more perfectly united, and everything adverse more entirely excluded."[292] This friendship of Smith, Black, and Hutton, if not so famous as the friendship between Smith and Hume, was not less really memorable.  Each of them had founded—­or done more than any other single person to found—­a science; they may be called the fathers of modern chemistry, of modern geology, and of modern political economy; and for all their great achievements, they were yet men of the most unaffected simplicity of character.  In other respects they were very different from one another, but their differences only knit them closer together, and made them more interesting to their friends.

Black was a man of fine presence and courtly bearing, grave, calm, polished, well dressed, speaking, what was then rare, correct English without a trace of Scotch accent, and always with sense and insight even in fields beyond his own.  Smith used to say that he never knew a man with less nonsense in him than Dr. Black, and that he was often indebted to his better discrimination in the judgment of character, a point in which Smith, not only by the general testimony of his acquaintance, but by his own confession, was by no means strong, inasmuch as he was, as he acknowledges,