it is perhaps legitimate to infer that his secretary must have been the same, and from the public appointments he held we may further gather that he was a man of parts.  The office of Judge Advocate for Scotland, which was founded at the Union, and which he was the first to fill, was a position of considerable responsibility, and was occupied after him by men, some of them of great distinction.  Alexander Fraser Tytler, the historian, for example, was Judge Advocate till he went to the bench as Lord Woodhouselee.  The Judge Advocate was clerk and legal adviser to the Courts Martial, but as military trials were not frequent in Scotland, the duties of this office took up but a minor share of the elder Smith’s time.  His chief business, at least for the last ten years of his life, was his work in the Custom-house, for though he was bred a Writer to the Signet—­that is, a solicitor privileged to practise before the Supreme Court—­he never seems to have actually practised that profession.  A local collectorship or controllership of the Customs was in itself a more important administrative office at that period, when duties were levied on twelve hundred articles, than it is now, when duties are levied on twelve only, and it was much sought after for the younger, or even the elder, sons of the gentry.  The very place held by Smith’s father at Kirkcaldy was held for many years after his day by a Scotch baronet, Sir Michael Balfour.  The salary was not high.  Adam Smith began in 1713 with L30 a year, and had only L40 when he died in 1723, but then the perquisites of those offices in the Customs were usually twice or thrice the salary, as we know from the Wealth of Nations itself (Book V. chap. ii.).  Smith had a cousin, a third Adam Smith, who was in 1754 Collector of Customs at Alloa with a salary of L60 a year, and who writes his cousin, in connection with a negotiation the latter was conducting on behalf of a friend for the purchase of the office, that the place was worth L200 a year, and that he would not sell it for less than ten years’ purchase.[1]

Smith’s father died in the spring of 1723, a few months before his famous son was born.  Some doubt has been cast upon this fact by an announcement quoted by President M’Cosh, in his Scottish Philosophy, from the Scots Magazine of 1740, of the promotion of Adam Smith, Comptroller of the Customs, Kirkcaldy, to be Inspector-General of the Outports.  But conclusive evidence exists of the date of the death of Smith’s father in a receipt for his funeral expenses, which is in the possession of Professor Cunningham, and which, as a curious illustration of the habits of the time, I subjoin in a note below.[2] The promotion of 1740 is the promotion not of Smith’s father but of his cousin, whom I have just had occasion to mention, and who appears from Chamberlayne’s Notitia Angliae to have been Comptroller of the Customs at Kirkcaldy from about 1734 till somewhere before 1741.  In the Notitia Angliae for