and prints.  Secondly, your boys, and how employed.  Thirdly, the people who have studied under you with a view to the mechanical art.  And lastly, give some account of the prospects which you think you have of being of use either to the mechanical or to the fine arts of your country.  Frame this into a memorial and send it to me.  I shall have it tryed here by some who wish well to you, and as I go to London in the spring, I shall, together with Mr. Wedderburn and Mr. Elliot, consider what are the most prudent measures to take for your sake, or whether to take any.  Mr. Smith is too busy or too indolent, but I flatter myself Dr. Black will be happy to make out this memorial for you.  Let me know if I have any chance of seeing you this winter.  I have none of being at Glasgow, and therefore wish you and Mr. Smith would come here, or you by yourself would come here in the Christmas vacance.”

The memorial alluded to in this letter was no doubt a memorial to Government in behalf of a project then promoted by the Earl of Selkirk and other friends of Foulis, of settling a salary on him for directing an institution so useful to the nation as the Academy of Design.  Whether Smith overcame his alleged indolence and drew up the memorial I cannot say, but this whole letter shows that Smith and Black were the two friends in Glasgow whom Foulis was in the habit of principally consulting, and the last sentence seems to indicate that Smith’s hand in the business was hardly less intimate than Dalrymple’s own.  It may be noticed too how completely Sir John Dalrymple’s ideas of Smith, as implied in this letter, differ from those which are current now, and how he sends a tradesman to the philosopher for advice on practical points in his trade.  As to pure questions of art, whether this work or that is finest, he thinks Foulis himself may possibly be the best judge, but when it comes to a question as to which will sell the best—­and that was the question for the success of the project—­then he is urged to take the practical mind of Smith to his counsels.  Though Smith’s leanings were not to practical life, his judgment, as any page of the Wealth of Nations shows, was of the most eminently practical kind.  He had little of the impulse to meddle in affairs or the itch to manage them that belongs to more bustling people, but had unquestionably a practical mind and capacity.

If Smith was consulted by Foulis in this way about the management of the Academy of Design, we may safely infer that he had also more to do with the Foulis press than merely visiting the office to see the famous Iliad while it was on the case.  Smith’s connection with Foulis began before he went to Glasgow, by the publication of Hamilton of Bangour’s poems by the University press, and I think it not unreasonable to see traces of Smith’s suggestion in the number of early economic books which Foulis reissued after the year 1750, works of writers like Child, Gee, Mun, Law, and Petty.