During his stay in London Smith was in close intercourse with the ruling kings of art, science, and letters, as well as with some of the leading statesmen. We hear of him in January 1775 with Johnson, Burke, and Gibbon at a dinner given by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In December, Horace Walpole met him at Beauclerk’s. With Gibbon, as we have seen, he attended Dr. William Hunter’s lectures on Anatomy. Hume’s letters to him were addressed to the British Coffee House in Cockspur Street, a club kept by a clever sister of Bishop Douglas and much favoured by Scots in London, though Goldsmith, Reynolds, Garrick, and Richard Cumberland were also members. In 1775 he was elected a member of the famous Literary Club which met at the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street. The members present on the night of his election were Gibbon, Reynolds, Beauclerk, and Sir William Jones, three of whom appear in Dean Barnard’s lines:— “If I have thoughts and can’t express ’em, Gibbon shall teach me how to dress ’em In form select and terse; Jones teach me modesty and Greek, Smith how to think, Burke how to speak, And Beauclerk to converse.” The still small voice of a detractor was heard: Boswell wrote to a friend that with Smith’s accession the club had “lost its select merit.” All this time the fatal quarrel with America was drawing near. Upon this, as upon all other economical questions, Smith was in full sympathy with Burke, “the only man I ever knew who thinks on economic subjects exactly as I do, without any previous communications having passed between us.” This compliment, as we know, was highly valued by the author of the speech on American Taxation. But Smith had another friend and counsellor for his critical chapter on the colonies and their administration. Dr. Franklin is reported to have said, that “the celebrated Adam Smith when writing his _Wealth of Nations_ was in the habit of bringing chapter after chapter as he composed it to himself, Dr. Price, and others of the literati”; that he would then patiently hear their observations, sometimes submitting to write whole chapters anew, and even to reverse some of his propositions. Franklin’s remark has probably been inaccurately reported. We know from one of Smith’s letters that he had not a high opinion of Dr. Price as an economist; but Parton, Franklin’s biographer, justly points to the countless colonial illustrations with which the _Wealth of Nations_ abounds, and to that intimate knowledge of American conditions which Franklin was of all men the best fitted to impart. And there is internal evidence in the text itself that the important chapter on the colonies in Book IV. was written, or at least considerably enlarged, in the years 1773 and 1774. Franklin’s papers contained problems which seemed to have been jotted down at meetings of philosophers, and no doubt Price as well as Smith would take a prominent part. At Glasgow Smith must have heard a good