The rent was probably very nearly £20 a year. But Smith was one of the richest men in Edinburgh, and felt, no doubt, that he could well afford to take one of the best houses in the city. To share and crown his happiness he brought his mother, his cousin Miss Douglas, and her nephew, a schoolboy David Douglas (afterwards Lord Strathendry), whom he made his heir. From Panmure House “Mr. Commissioner Smith” walked every day to his official duties in Exchange Square, attired in a light-coloured coat, white silk stockings, and a broad-brimmed hat, holding a cane at his shoulder as a soldier carries a musket. He used to turn his head gently from side to side as he walked, and swayed his body “vermicularly,” as if at every other step he meant to alter his direction or even to turn back.[42] His lips often moved, and he would smile like one conversing with an invisible companion. He was not always unaware of his surroundings, and was fond of relating how a market woman in the High Street took him for a well-to-do lunatic. “Hech, sirs!” she cried, “to let the like of him be about! And yet he’s weel enough put on!”
His letters show that he was very regular in attending to his duties at the Customs, which indeed were important in themselves, and not unattractive to one who took so deep an interest in the art of revenue and the growth of wealth. The duties of the Commissioners were administrative and judicial. Sometimes they had to despatch soldiers to guard part of the coast against smugglers, or to put down an illegal still. They heard merchants’ appeals from assessments; they appointed and controlled the local officers, and every year they prepared returns of customs’ revenue and expenditure. There is good reason to think that he found his work congenial, though Dugald Stewart, who always grows morbid at the thought of any check to the output of philosophic literature, laments that these duties, “though they required little exertion of thought, were yet sufficient to waste his spirits and dissipate his attention,” and that the time they consumed was not employed in labours more profitable to the world and more equal to his mind. During the first years of his residence in Edinburgh “his studies seemed to be entirely suspended, and his passion for letters served only to amuse his leisure and to animate his conversation.” This young mentor often caught our misguided veteran wasting precious time in his library with Sophocles or Euripides, and would be told that re-acquaintance with the favourites of one’s youth is the most grateful and soothing diversion of old age. Let us forgive, and more than forgive, the tired economist, who disapproved that care, though wise in show,
“That with superfluous burden loads the day,
And, when God sends a cheerful hour, refrains.”
It is indeed to be wished that the notes on Jurisprudence could have been worked up into an ample study after the manner of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws; but probably all that would have been gained by retirement would have been the publication of his lectures on belles lettres; and it is certain that some of the most instructive additions to the Wealth of Nations could never have been written, had Smith declined the office of Commissioner.
At any rate, a problematical loss to the world was a great gain to Edinburgh. Smith, though personally the most frugal, was also the most hospitable, genial, and charitable of men. Hume’s death, indeed, left a gap that could not be filled. But every city in Europe might still envy Edinburgh her Republic of Letters. Robertson the historian, who formed with Hume and Gibbon what Gibbon proudly called the Triumvirate, and Adam Ferguson, a little jealous at this time of his greater rival, lived outside the town. Black, too, who had taken Hume’s place as Smith’s dearest living friend, had what was in those days a country house, now the Royal Blind Asylum in Nicolson Street. Kames, Hailes, and Monboddo, Sir John Dalrymple and Dugald Stewart, and many other minor celebrities, lived close at hand. Smith seems to have kept something like open house. His Sunday suppers were remembered long after his death, and many distinguished visitors to Edinburgh enjoyed the hospitality of Panmure House.
He loved good conversation. In Glasgow and in London he had belonged to several dining-clubs, and he now helped to found another. Swediaur, a Parisian doctor, wrote from Edinburgh in 1784 to Jeremy Bentham: “we have a club here which consists of nothing but philosophers.” They met every Friday at two o’clock in a Grassmarket tavern, and the Frenchman found it “a most enlightened, agreeable, cheerful, and social company.” Smith, Black, and Hutton, the fathers of the three modern sciences of political economy, modern chemistry, and modern geology, were the illustrious founders of this society. All three, wrote another member, Professor John Playfair, had enlarged views and wide information, “without any of the stateliness which men of letters think it sometimes necessary to affect; ... and as the sincerity of their friendship had never been darkened by the least shade of envy, it would be hard to find an example where everything favourable to good society was more perfectly united, and everything adverse more entirely excluded.” Henry Mackenzie, who wrote the Man of Feeling, and Dugald Stewart were also members.
The club was called the Oyster Club, though Hutton was an abstainer, Black a vegetarian, and Smith’s only extravagant taste was for lump sugar.
“We shall never,” wrote Sir Walter Scott in some recollections of these “old Northern Lights,” which appeared in an early number of the Quarterly Review, “forget one particular evening when he [Smith] put an elderly maiden lady who presided at the tea-table to sore confusion by neglecting utterly her invitation to be seated, and walking round and round the circle, stopping ever and anon to steal a lump from the sugar basin, which the venerable spinster was at length constrained to place on her own knee, as the only method of securing it from his uneconomical depredations. His appearance mumping the eternal sugar was something indescribable.” Sir Walter was a schoolfellow of young David Douglas; and the incident no doubt took place in Panmure House, where Miss Douglas would naturally preside at the tea-table.
Scott had a vivid recollection of Black and Hutton. The former used the English pronunciation, and spoke with punctilious accuracy of expression. He wore the formal full-dress habit then imposed on members of the medical faculty. Dr. Hutton’s dress had the simplicity of a Quaker’s, and he used a broad Scotch accent which often heightened his humour. Sir Walter told an amusing anecdote which may, perhaps, explain why the dining society, founded by the three philosophers, was called the Oyster Club. It so chanced that Black and Hutton had held some discourse together upon the folly of abstaining from feeding on the crustaceous creatures of the land, when those of the sea were considered as delicacies. Snails were known to be nutritious and wholesome, even “sanative” in some cases. The epicures of ancient Rome enumerated the snails of Lucca among the richest and rarest delicacies, and the modern Italians still held them in esteem. So a gastronomic experiment was resolved on. The snails were procured, dieted for a time, then stewed.