of the statesman’s biographers informs us, on the authority of an eminent literary friend, who paid him a visit at Beaconsfield after his retirement from public life, that he then spoke with the warmest admiration of Smith’s vast learning, his profound understanding, and the great importance of his writings, and added that his heart was as good and rare as his head, and that his manners were “peculiarly pleasing."[327] Smith on his part was drawn to Burke by no less powerful an attraction.  He once paid him a compliment with which the latter appears to have been particularly gratified, for he repeated it to his literary friend on this same occasion.  “Burke,” said the economist, “is the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us."[328]

The installation of Lord Rector was to take place on Saturday the 10th of April, and Burke arrived in Edinburgh on Tuesday or Wednesday previous.  Whether he was Smith’s guest while there I am unable to say, but at any rate it was Smith who did the honours of the town to him, and accompanied him wherever he went.  Dalzel, the Greek professor, gives an account of the statesman’s visit, to his old friend and class-fellow, Sir Robert Liston, and states that “Lord Maitland attended him constantly and Mr. Adam Smith.  They brought him,” he adds, “to my house the day after he arrived.”  Lord Maitland was the eldest son of the Earl of Lauderdale, and became a well-known figure both in politics and in scientific economics after he succeeded to the peerage himself.  I have already mentioned him for his admiration of Smith, and his defence of him from the disparaging remarks of Fox, though he was himself no blind follower of the Wealth of Nations, but one of the earliest and not the least acute of the critics of that work.  He was at this time one of the rising hopes of the Whigs in the House of Commons, which he had entered as representative of a Cornish borough in 1780.  Dalzel had been his tutor, and had accompanied him in that capacity to Oxford; and being also a great favourite with Smith, whom he respected above all things for his knowledge of Greek, he was naturally among the first of the eminent citizens to whom they introduced their distinguished guest.

On Thursday morning Burke and Smith went out with Lord Maitland to Hatton, the Lauderdale seat in Midlothian, to dine and stay the night there on their way to Glasgow, and Dugald Stewart and Dalzel joined them later in the day after they had finished their college classes.  The conversation happened very naturally to touch on party prospects, for they were at the moment in the thick of a general election—­the famous election of 1784, so fatal to the Whigs, when near 160 supporters of the Coalition Ministry—­“Fox’s martyrs”—­lost their seats, and Pitt was sent back with an enormous majority behind him.  Parliament had been dissolved a fortnight before, and