after his defeat at Glasgow, had settled for a time into the modest post of librarian to the Faculty of Advocates, and was writing his History of England in his dim apartments in the Canongate.  Adam Ferguson, who threw up his clerical calling in 1754, and wrote Smith from Groningen to give him “clerical titles” no more, for he was “a downright layman,” came to Edinburgh, and was made Hume’s successor in the Advocates’ Library in 1757 and professor in the University in 1759.  Robertson did not live in Edinburgh till 1758, but he used to come to town every week with his neighbour John Home before the latter left Scotland in 1757, and they held late sittings with Hume and the other men of letters in the evening.  Gilbert Elliot entered Parliament in 1754, but was always back during the recess with news of men and things in the capital.  The two Dalrymples—­Sir David of Hailes, and Sir John of Cousland—­were toiling at their respective histories, and both were personal friends of Smith’s; while another, of whom Smith was particularly fond—­Wilkie, the eccentric author of the Epigoniad—­was living a few miles out as minister of the parish of Ratho.  Wilkie always said that Smith had far more originality and invention than Hume, and that while Hume had only industry and judgment, Smith had industry and genius.  His mind was at least the more constructive of the two.  A remark of Smith’s about Wilkie has also been preserved, and though it is of no importance, it may be repeated.  Quoting Lord Elibank, he said that whether it was in learned company or unlearned, wherever Wilkie’s name was mentioned it was never dropped soon, for everybody had much to say about him.[75] But that was probably due to his oddities as much as anything else.  Wilkie used to plough his own glebe with his own hands in the ordinary ploughman’s dress, and it was he who was the occasion of the joke played on Dr. Roebuck, the chemist, by a Scotch friend, who said to him as they were passing Ratho glebe that the parish schools of Scotland had given almost every peasant a knowledge of the classics, and added, “Here, for example, is a man working in the field who is a good illustration of that training; let us speak with him.”  Roebuck made some observation about agriculture.  “Yes, sir,” said the ploughman, “but in Sicily they had a different method,” and he quoted Theocritus, to Roebuck’s great astonishment.

Among Smith’s chief Edinburgh friends at this period was one of his former pupils, William Johnstone—­son of Sir James Johnstone of Westerhall, and nephew of Lord Elibank—­who was then practising as an advocate at the Scotch bar, but ultimately went into Parliament, married the greatest heiress of the time, Miss Pulteney, niece of the Earl of Bath, and long filled an honoured and influential place in public life as Sir William Pulteney.  He was, as even Wraxall admits, a man of “masculine sense” and “independent as well as upright” character, and he devoted special attention to all economic and