Gibbon had sent him a present of the three concluding volumes of the Decline and Fall, and Smith writes him in November a brief letter of thanks, in which he sets the English historian where he used to set Voltaire, at the head of all living men of letters.
Edinburgh, 18th December 1788.
My Dear Friend—I have ten thousand apologies to make for not having long ago returned you my best thanks for the very agreeable present you made me of the three last volumes of your History. I cannot express to you the pleasure it gives me to find that by the universal consent of every man of taste and learning whom I either know or correspond with, it sets you at the very head of the whole literary tribe at present existing in Europe.—I ever am, my dear friend, most affectionately yours,
Adam Smith.[349]
In this letter Smith makes no complaint of his condition of health, but he seems to have got worse again in the course of the winter, for we find Gibbon writing Cadell, the bookseller, with some apparent anxiety on the 11th of February 1789: "If you can send me a good account of Adam Smith, there is no man more sincerely interested in his welfare than myself." If, however, he were ill then, he recovered in the summer, and was in excellent spirits in July, when Samuel Rogers saw him often during a week he spent in Edinburgh.
FOOTNOTES:
[342] Pellew's Life of Sidmouth, i. 151.
[343] Wilberforce's Correspondence, i. 40.
[344] Bowring's Memoir of Bentham, Bentham's Works, x. 173.
[345] Wilberforce's Correspondence, i. 40.
[346] The Bee, vol. in. p. 165.
[347] Glasgow College Minutes.