of second sight in the Highlands, and especially of the eccentric Caithness laird, who used the pretension as a very effectual instrument for maintaining authority and discipline among his tenantry.  They spoke much too about the poetesses,—­Hannah More, and Mrs. Charlotte Smith, and Mrs. John Hunter, the great surgeon’s wife; but it appears to have still been Mackenzie who bore the burden of the talk.  The only thing Rogers reports Smith as saying is a very ordinary remark about Dr. Blair.  They had been speaking, as was natural, about the sermon which Rogers—­and Mackenzie also—­had heard the previous afternoon on “Curiosity concerning the Affairs of Others,” and one passage in which, though it reads now commonplace enough in the printed page, Rogers seems to have admired greatly.  Smith observed that Blair was too puffed up, and the worthy divine would have been more or less than human if he had escaped the necessary effects of the excessive popularity he so long enjoyed at once as a preacher and as a critic.  It will be remembered how Burns detested Blair’s absurd condescension and pomposity.

From Smith’s the company seems to have proceeded in a body to a meeting of the Royal Society, of which all were members except Muir and Rogers himself.  Before going Mackenzie repeated an epigram which had been written on Smith sleeping at the meetings of this society, but the epigram has not been preserved.  Only seven persons were present—­Smith and his guests and the reader of the paper for the day, who happened to be the economist, Dr. James Anderson, already mentioned repeatedly in this book as the original propounder of Ricardo’s theory of rent.  His paper was on “Debtors and the Revision of the Laws that respect them,” and Rogers says it was “very long and dull,” and, as a natural consequence, “Mr. Commissioner Smith fell asleep, and Mackenzie touched my elbow and smiled,"[353]—­a curious tableau.  When the meeting was over Rogers took leave of his host, went to the play with Mrs. Piozzi, and, though he no doubt saw Smith again before finally quitting Edinburgh, mentions him no more.

Having been so much with Smith during those few days, Rogers’s impressions are in some respects of considerable value.  He was deeply impressed with the warmth of Smith’s kindness.  “He is a very friendly, agreeable man, and I should have dined and supped with him every day, if I had accepted all his invitations."[354] He was very communicative,[355] and to Rogers’s surprise, considering the disparity of their years and the greatness of his reputation, Smith was “quite familiar.”  “Who shall we have to dinner?” he would ask.  Rogers observed in him no sign of absence of mind,[356] and felt that as compared with Robertson, Smith was far more of a man who had seen much of the world.  His communicativeness impressed itself also upon other casual visitors, because his first appearance sometimes gave them the opposite suggestion of reserve.  “He was extremely communicative,” says the anonymous writer who sent the first letter of reminiscences to the editor of the Bee, “and delivered himself on every subject with a freedom and boldness quite opposite to the apparent reserve of his appearance.”