Dr. Carlyle was among the guests at Dalkeith House, and in his autobiography takes some credit to himself for the success of the proceedings. “Adam Smith,” he says, “was but ill qualified to promote the jollity of a birthday,” and but for Carlyle’s exertions the meeting might have been dissolved without even drinking the proper toasts. His conclusion is that the Duke and Duchess should have brought down a man of “more address,” and he leaves little doubt as to who that man should have been. Incidentally Dr. Carlyle has to admit that the new Duke proved a great credit to his tutor. The Buccleuch family had always been good landlords, but Duke Henry “surpassed them all as much in justice and humanity as he did in superiority of understanding and good sense.” Lord Brougham relates a story which illustrates what Carlyle meant by “want of address.” On one occasion, during dinner at Dalkeith, our philosopher broke out into a discourse on some political matters of the day, and was bestowing a variety of severe epithets on a certain statesman, when he suddenly perceived the statesman’s nearest relative sitting opposite, and stopped; but he was heard to mutter, “Deil care, deil care, it’s all true!” After two months at Dalkeith he returned to his mother and his studies, and remained for the next six years, so far as we know, uninterruptedly at Kirkcaldy, save for an occasional visit to Edinburgh, whither he was constantly and with much importunity invited by his friend Hume. Dugald Stewart remarks that this retirement “formed a striking contrast to the unsettled mode of life he had been for some time accustomed to, but was so congenial to his natural disposition, and to his first habits, that it was with the utmost difficulty he was ever persuaded to leave it.” He was never happier than now, living with his mother in Kirkcaldy; “occupied habitually in intense study, but unbending his mind at times in the company of some of his old school-fellows, whose sober wishes’ had attached them to the place of their birth. In the society of such men Mr. Smith delighted; and to them he was endeared, not only by his simple and unassuming manners, but by the perfect knowledge they all possessed of those domestic virtues which had distinguished him from his infancy.”[25] The High Street of Kirkcaldy contained some excellent houses, and that occupied by Smith was one of the best. It was large and substantially built, four stories high, with twenty windows facing into the High Street. It had a frontage of about fifty feet, and a garden of the same width ran back a hundred yards or more eastwards down to the sands. On either side of the garden was a high wall, and on the north side a narrow public footpath divided Smith’s garden from his neighbour’s. This quaint passage, enclosed by two high walls, is still called Adam Smith’s Close.