Smith’s new duties did not pre-engage his pen from higher work altogether, for before the close of 1782 he had written some considerable additions to the Wealth of Nations, which he proposed to insert in the third edition, among them a history of the trading companies of Great Britain, including, no doubt, his history of the East India Company, which Mr. Thorold Rogers supposed him to have written ten years before and kept in his desk.  He writes Cadell on the 7th December 1782:—­

I have many apologies to make to you for my idleness since I came to Scotland.  The truth is, I bought at London a good many partly new books or editions that were new to me, and the amusement I found in reading and diverting myself with them debauched me from my proper business, the preparing a new edition of the Wealth of Nations.  I am now, however, heartily engaged at my proper work, and I hope in two or three months to send you up the second edition corrected in many places, with three or four very considerable additions, chiefly to the second volume.  Among the rest is a short but, I flatter myself, a complete history of all the trading companies in Great Britain.  These additions I mean not only to be inserted at their proper places into the new edition, but to be printed separately and to be sold for a shilling or half-a-crown to the purchasers of the old edition.  The price must depend on the bulk of the additions when they are all written out.  It would give me great satisfaction if you would let me know by the return of the Post if this delay will not be inconvenient.  Remember me to Strahan.  He will be so good as excuse my not writing to him, as I have nothing to say but what I have now said to you, and he knows my aversion to writing.[313]

The additions of which he speaks in this letter were published separately in 1783 in quarto, so as to suit the two previous editions of the work, and the new edition containing them was published in the end of 1784 in three volumes octavo, at the price of a guinea.  The delay was due to booksellers’ reasons.  Dr. Swediaur, the eminent Paris physician, who was resident in Edinburgh at the time studying with Cullen, wrote Bentham in November 1784 that Smith, whom he used to see at least once a week, had shown him the new edition printed and finished, but had told him that Cadell would not publish it till all the people of fashion had arrived in London, and would then at once push a large sale.  Swediaur adds that he found this was a bookseller’s trick very generally practised, and of Smith himself he says he found him “a very unprejudiced and good man."[314]