Nor were these annual competitions the only local institutions in which Smith took a more or less active interest.  One of the duties of a citizen which he undertook will perhaps occasion surprise—­he became a Captain of the City Guard.  He was made Honorary Captain of the Trained Bands of Edinburgh—­the City Guard—­on the 4th of June 1781, “with the usual solemnity,” the minutes state, “and after spending the evening with grate joy, the whole corps retired, but in distinct divisions and good order, to quarters."[319]

The business of this body, according to its minutes, seems practically to have been mostly of a convivial character, and we can sympathise with the honest pride of the clerk in recording in what a condition of good order they were able to retire after celebrating that auspicious occasion with the joy it deserved.  Smith no doubt attended their periodical festivities, or paid his fine of eight magnums of claret for absence.  But their business was not all claret and punch.  On the 8th September 1784, for example, the captains, lieutenants, and ensigns of the Trained Bands were called out, in consequence of an order from the Lord Provost, “to attend the wheeping of Paull and Anderson, actors in the late riots at Cannonmills.”  A rescue riot was apprehended, and the Trained Bands met in the old Justiciary Court-room, and were armed there with “stowt oaken sticks.”  Marching forth in regular order, they acted as guard to the magistrates during the day, and “by their formidable and respectable appearance had the good effect of detering the multitude so that they became only peaceable spectators.”  Whether an honorary captain could be called upon for active service in an emergency I cannot say, but Smith’s name is not mentioned in the list of absentee captains upon this occasion.

In 1783 Smith joined Robertson and others in founding the Royal Society of Edinburgh.  Robertson had long entertained the idea of establishing a society on the model of the foreign academies for the cultivation of every branch of science, learning, and taste, and he was at length moved into action by the steps taken in 1782 by the Earl of Buchan and others to obtain a royal charter for the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, founded two years before.  Robertson was very anxious to have only one learned society in Edinburgh, of which antiquities might be made a branch subject, and he even induced the University authorities to petition Parliament against granting a charter of incorporation to the Antiquarian Society.  In this strong step the University was seconded by the Faculty of Advocates and the old Philosophical Society, founded by Colin Maclaurin in 1739, but their efforts failed.  Out of the agitation, however, the Royal Society came into being.  Whether Smith actively supported Robertson, or supported him at all, in his exertions against the Antiquarian Society, I do not know.  He was not, as Robertson was, a member of the Society of Antiquaries.  But he