Rogers was with Smith again on Sunday the 19th, and used ever afterwards to speak of that particular Sunday as the most memorable in his life, for he breakfasted with Robertson, heard him preach in the Old Greyfriars in the forenoon, heard Blair preach in the High Church in the afternoon, drank coffee thereafter with Mrs. Piozzi, and finished the day by supping with Adam Smith.  He had called on Smith “between sermons,” as they say in Scotland, and apparently close on the hour for service, since “all the bells of the kirks” were ringing.  But Smith was going for an airing, and his chair was at the door.  The sedan was much in vogue in Edinburgh at that period, because it threaded the narrow wynds and alleys better than any other sort of carriage was able to do.  Smith met Rogers at the door, and after exchanging the few observations about Bogle and the club to which I have already alluded, he invited his young friend to come back to supper in the evening, and also to dinner on Monday, because he had asked Henry Mackenzie, the author of the Man of Feeling, to meet him.  “Who could refuse?” writes Rogers.  Smith then set out in his sedan, and Rogers walked up to the High Church to hear Blair.  Returning to Panmure House at nine, he found there, he says, all the company who were at the club on Friday except Bogle and Macaulay, and with the addition of a Mr. Muir from Goettingen. (I do not know who Macaulay and Muir were.) They spoke of Junius, and Smith suspected Single-speech Hamilton of the authorship, on the ground of the well-known story, which seems to have been then new to Rogers, and which Smith had been told by Gibbon, that on one occasion when Hamilton was on a visit at Goodwood, he informed the Duke of Richmond that there was a devilish keen letter from Junius in the Public Advertiser of that day, and mentioned even some of the points it made; but when the Duke got hold of the paper he found the letter itself was not there, but only an apology for its absence.  From this circumstance Hamilton’s name came to be mentioned in connection with the authorship of the letters, and they ceased to appear.  Smith’s argument was that so long as the letters were attributed to men who were not their writers, such as Lord Lansdowne or Burke, they continued to go on, but immediately the true author was named they stopped.  The conversation passed on to Turgot and Voltaire and the Duke of Richelieu, and its particulars have been stated already in previous parts of this work.[352]

On Monday Rogers dined at Smith’s house to meet Henry Mackenzie, as had been arranged, and the other guests seem to have been the Mr. Muir of the evening before and Mr. M’Gowan—­John M’Gowan, Clerk of the Signet, already referred to.  Dr. Hutton came in afterwards and joined them at tea.  The chief share in the conversation seems to have been taken by Mackenzie, who, as we know from Scott, was always “the life of company with anecdotes and fun,” and related on this occasion many stories