Dugald Stewart failed to collect any information about Smith’s Oxford days, but a few relics have been preserved by Lord Brougham in the appendix to the discursive and rather disappointing essay upon Adam Smith that appears in his _Lives of the Philosophers_. “I have now before me,” says Brougham, “a number of Dr. Smith’s letters written when at Oxford between the years 1740 and 1746 to his mother: they are almost all upon mere family and personal matters; most of them indeed upon his linen and other such necessaries, but all show his strong affection for his parent.” The few quotations Brougham gives are barely worth recording. On November 29, 1743, Adam Smith writes: “I am just recovered of a violent fit of laziness, which has confined me to my elbow chair these three months.” Again on July 2, 1744: “I am quite inexcusable for not writing to you oftener. I think of you every day, but always defer writing till the post is just going, and then sometimes business or company, but oftener laziness, hinders me.” He speaks of “an inveterate scurvy and shaking of the head” which have been perfectly cured by tar water, “a remedy very much in vogue here for all diseases.” His college contemporaries, says Mr. Rae, “were a singularly undistinguished body,” with the exception of a Fifeshire man, John Douglas, who had gone direct to Oxford from the Grammar School at Dunbar. Douglas at first had a small exhibition at St. Mary’s Hall, but after fighting at Fontenoy, he obtained a Snell Exhibition. He distinguished himself later as a pamphleteer and was rewarded with the Bishopric of Salisbury. With this exception, Adam Smith seems to have made no friends at Oxford. Besides his books he must have enjoyed from time to time walks and excursions into the surrounding country. In the _Wealth of Nations_ he was able to make close comparisons of the condition of the labouring classes in England and Scotland, and there is a passage, about the use of coal and wood by the common people in Oxfordshire, to show that he had certainly acquired as an undergraduate the faculty of minute and picturesque observation which he afterwards turned to such account.[5] What Smith did in the vacations we do not know. He could not have had much money to spare, and there is no indication that he ever returned home or even visited London.