nature of the endowment of a national theatre, which is sometimes demanded nowadays.  All the encouragement he asks for is liberty—­“entire liberty to all those who from their own interest would attempt, without scandal or indecency, to amuse and divert the people by painting, poetry, music, dancing, by all sorts of dramatic representations and exhibitions.”  But in pressing for this liberty, he expresses the strongest conviction that “the frequency and gaiety of public diversions” is absolutely essential for the good of the commonwealth, in order to “correct whatever is unsocial or disagreeably rigorous in the morals of all the little sects into which the country is divided,” and to “dissipate that melancholy and gloomy humour which is almost always the source of popular superstition and enthusiasm."[61] Yet here we seem to find him in alliance with the little sects himself, and trying to crush that liberty of dramatic representations which he declares to be so vital to the health of the community.

The reason is not, moreover, that he had changed his opinions in the interval between the attempts to suppress the Glasgow playhouse in 1762 and the publication of his general plea for playhouses in the Wealth of Nations in 1776.  He had not changed his opinions.  He travelled with a pupil to France, still warm from this agitation in Glasgow, and, as we learn from Stewart, was a great frequenter and admirer of the theatre in that country,[62] and a few years before the agitation began he was as deeply interested as any other of John Home’s friends in the representations of the tragedy of Douglas, and as much a partisan of Home’s cause.  He does not appear indeed, as is sometimes stated, to have been present either at the public performance of Home’s tragedy in Edinburgh in 1756, or at the previous private performance, which is alleged to have taken place at Mrs. Ward the actress’s rooms, and in which the author himself, and Hume, Carlyle, Ferguson, and Blair are all said to have acted parts.  But that he was in complete sympathy with them on the subject is manifest from an undated letter of Hume to Smith, which must have been written in that year.  In this letter, knowing Smith’s sentiments, he writes:  “I can now give you the satisfaction of hearing that the play, though not near so well acted in Covent Garden as in this place, is likely to be very successful.  Its great intrinsic merit breaks through all obstacles.  When it shall be printed (which shall be soon) I am persuaded it will be esteemed the best, and by French critics the only tragedy of our language.”  After finishing his letter he adds:  “I have just now received a copy of Douglas from London.  It will instantly be put on the press.  I hope to be able to send you a copy in the same parcel with the dedication."[63] These sentences certainly imply that Smith’s ideas of theatrical representations were in harmony with those of Hume and his other Edinburgh friends, but shortly afterwards he is seeking to revive obsolete academic privileges to prevent the erection of a theatre.