At any rate, a problematical loss to the world was a great gain to Edinburgh. Smith, though personally the most frugal, was also the most hospitable, genial, and charitable of men. Hume’s death, indeed, left a gap that could not be filled. But every city in Europe might still envy Edinburgh her Republic of Letters. Robertson the historian, who formed with Hume and Gibbon what Gibbon proudly called the Triumvirate, and Adam Ferguson, a little jealous at this time of his greater rival, lived outside the town. Black, too, who had taken Hume’s place as Smith’s dearest living friend, had what was in those days a country house, now the Royal Blind Asylum in Nicolson Street. Kames, Hailes, and Monboddo, Sir John Dalrymple and Dugald Stewart, and many other minor celebrities, lived close at hand. Smith seems to have kept something like open house. His Sunday suppers were remembered long after his death, and many distinguished visitors to Edinburgh enjoyed the hospitality of Panmure House. He loved good conversation. In Glasgow and in London he had belonged to several dining-clubs, and he now helped to found another. Swediaur, a Parisian doctor, wrote from Edinburgh in 1784 to Jeremy Bentham: “we have a club here which consists of nothing but philosophers.” They met every Friday at two o’clock in a Grassmarket tavern, and the Frenchman found it “a most enlightened, agreeable, cheerful, and social company.” Smith, Black, and Hutton, the fathers of the three modern sciences of political economy, modern chemistry, and modern geology, were the illustrious founders of this society. All three, wrote another member, Professor John Playfair, had enlarged views and wide information, “without any of the stateliness which men of letters think it sometimes necessary to affect; ... and as the sincerity of their friendship had never been darkened by the least shade of envy, it would be hard to find an example where everything favourable to good society was more perfectly united, and everything adverse more entirely excluded.” Henry Mackenzie, who wrote the _Man of Feeling_, and Dugald Stewart were also members. The club was called the Oyster Club, though Hutton was an abstainer, Black a vegetarian, and Smith’s only extravagant taste was for lump sugar.