They returned to Edinburgh on the 13th of September, and, says Windham, “after dinner walked to Adam Smith’s.  Felt strongly the impression of a family completely Scotch.  House magnificent and place fine....  Found there Colonels Balfour and Ross, the former late aide-de-camp to General Howe, the latter to Lord Cornwallis.  Felt strongly the impression of a company completely Scotch.”

Colonel Nesbit Balfour, who won great distinction in the American war, was the son of one of Smith’s old Fifeshire neighbours, a proprietor in that county, and became afterwards well known in Parliament, where he sat from 1790 to 1812.  Colonel (afterwards General) Alexander Ross had also taken a distinguished part in the American war, and was Cornwallis’s most intimate friend and correspondent.  He was at this time Deputy-Adjutant-General of the Forces in Scotland.  Whether he was a relation of the Colonel Patrick Ross of whom Smith speaks in one of his letters as a kinsman of his own,[335] I cannot say.

Next day, the 14th, Burke and Windham dined with Smith.  There was no other guest except a Mr. Skene, no doubt one of Smith’s cousins from Pitlour, probably the Inspector-General of Scotch Roads already mentioned.[336] On the following morning the two statesmen proceeded on their way southward.

One of the visits Burke paid in Edinburgh was to a charming poet, to whom fortune has been singularly unkind, not only treating him cruelly when alive, but instead of granting the usual posthumous reparation, treating him even more cruelly after his death.  I mean John Logan, the author of the Ode to the Cuckoo, which Burke thought the most beautiful lyric in the language.  Logan was at the moment in the thick of his troubles.  He had written a tragedy called Runnymede, which, though accepted by the management of Covent Garden, was prohibited by the Lord Chamberlain, who scented current politics in the bold speeches of the Barons of King John, but it was eventually produced in the Edinburgh theatre in 1783.  Its production immediately involved the author, as one of the ministers of Leith, in difficulties with his parishioners and the ecclesiastical courts similar to those which John Home had encountered twenty years before, and the trouble ended in Logan resigning his charge in December 1786 on a pension of L40 a year.  Smith, who was an admirer and, as Dr. Carlyle mentions to Bishop Douglas, a “great patron” of Logan, stood by him through these troubles.  When they first broke out in 1783 he wished, as Logan himself tells his old pupil Sir John Sinclair, to get the poet transferred if possible from his parish in Leith to the more liberal and enlightened parish of the Canongate, and when Logan eventually made up his mind to take refuge in literature, Smith gave him the following letter of introduction to Andrew Strahan, who had, since his father’s death, become the head of the firm:—­