Fortune now played our provident philosopher one of her most insolent tricks. When the dreaded _Dialogues_ appeared, they fell perfectly flat; but the letter to Strahan excited, as Mr. Rae says, “a long reverberation of angry criticism.” His words, few and simple, but warm with the glow of friendship, “rang like a challenge to religion itself.” Pamphlets poured forth, the cleverest of which, “A Letter to Adam Smith, LL.D., on the Life, Death, and Philosophy of David Hume, Esquire, by one of the People called Christians,” was still being printed and circulated for edification by the Religious Tract Society in the thirtieth year of the nineteenth century. Its anonymous author, Dr. George Horne, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, proclaimed that no unbeliever could be virtuous or charitable, and charged Smith as well as Hume with the atrocious wickedness of diffusing atheism through the land. “You would persuade us,” he cried, “by the example of David Hume, Esq., that atheism is the only cordial for low spirits and the proper antidote against the fear of death; but surely he who can reflect with complacency on a friend thus employing his talents in this life, and thus amusing himself with Lucian, whist, and Charon at his death, can smile over Babylon in ruins, esteem the earthquakes which destroyed Lisbon as agreeable occurrences, and congratulate the hardened Pharaoh on his overthrow in the Red Sea.” Smith made no answer to this attack, for which the author was afterwards rewarded by a Bishopric. After Christmas, when his mother’s health allowed him to leave her, he travelled to London, and early in January 1777 he had taken lodgings in Suffolk Street, near the British Coffee House, and was busy preparing his second edition of the _Wealth of Nations_, a reprint, with corrections and two additional pages. In March he was at a dinner of the Literary Club with Gibbon, Garrick, Reynolds, Johnson, Burke, and Fox. Mr. Rae thinks he remained most of the year in London, and probably he had some intercourse with Lord North and other members of the Government. At any rate Lord North, who had studied Smith’s chapters on taxation to more purpose than his chapters on expenditure and policy, borrowed two of his ideas in the Budget of 1777—for he laid taxes on men-servants and on property sold by auction.[39] Smith was back in Edinburgh by the end of this year, and there heard from Strahan that he had been appointed by Lord North one of the Commissioners of the Customs in Scotland. In the middle of January he writes from Kirkcaldy to Strahan, requesting him to send two copies of the second edition of the _Wealth of Nations_, “handsomely bound and gilt, one to Lord North, the other to Sir Gray Cooper,” and adds, “I believe that I have been very highly obliged to him [Cooper] in this business.”[40] The Commissionership was worth £600 a year, and Smith at once proposed to relinquish his pension; but the Duke of Buccleuch would not hear of it.