assume, by his friend and neighbour, James Oswald of Dunnikier, whom we know to have been among Kames’s most intimate friends and correspondents.  Kames, though now fifty-two, had not yet written any of the works which raised him afterwards to eminence, but he had long enjoyed in the literary society of the North something of that position which Voltaire laughs at him for trying to take towards the world in general; he was a law on all questions of taste, from an epic poem to a garden plot.  He had little Latin and no Greek, for he never was at college, and the classical quotations in his Sketches were translated for him by A.F.  Tytler.  But he had thrown himself with all the greater zeal on that account into English literature when English literature became the rage in Scotland after the Union, and he was soon crossing steel with Bishop Butler in metaphysics, and the accepted guide of the new Scotch poets in literary criticism.  Hamilton of Bangour confesses that he himself

    From Hume learned verse to criticise,

the Hume meant being his early friend, Henry Home of Kames, and not his later friend, David Hume the historian.[19] Home’s place in the literature of Scotland corresponds with his place in its agriculture; he was the first of the improvers; and Smith, who always held him in the deepest veneration, was not wrong when, on being complimented on the group of great writers who were then reflecting glory on Scotland, he said, “Yes, but we must every one of us acknowledge Kames for our master."[20]

When Home found Smith already as well versed in the English classics as himself, he suggested the delivery of this course of lectures on English literature and criticism.  The subject was fresh, it was fashionable, and though Stevenson, the Professor of Logic, had already lectured on it, and lectured on it in English too to his class, nobody had yet given lectures on it open to the general public, whose interest it had at the moment so much engaged.  The success of such a course seemed assured, and the event fully justified that prognostication.  The class was attended among others by Kames himself; by students for the bar, like Alexander Wedderburn, afterwards Lord Chancellor of England, and William Johnstone, who long played an influential part in Parliament as Sir William Pulteney; by young ministers of the city like Dr. Blair, who subsequently gave a similar course himself; and by many others, both young and old.  It brought Smith in, we are informed, a clear L100 sterling, and if we assume that the fee was a guinea, which was a customary fee at the period, the audience would be something better than a hundred.  It was probably held in the College, for Blair’s subsequent course was delivered there even before the establishment of any formal connection with the University by the creation of the professorship.