A year later, the death of his cousin, Miss Jane Douglas, left him, says Stewart, “alone and helpless,” and though he bore his loss bravely, and regained apparently his former cheerfulness, yet his health and strength gradually declined, until in the summer of 1790 he passed away. A few particulars have been preserved of these last two years by those who enjoyed his friendship and hospitality; but of his correspondence there is only a short letter thanking Gibbon, with whom he had long been on very affectionate terms, for the last three volumes of the _Decline and Fall_. “I cannot,” he writes, “express to you the pleasure it gives me to find that by the universal consent of every man of taste and learning whom I either know or correspond with, it sets you at the very head of the whole literary tribe at present existing in Europe.”[50] In July 1789, Samuel Rogers, then a young man of twenty-three, came to Edinburgh with an introduction to Adam Smith from Price. On the morning after the storming of the Bastille he called on the economist, and found him breakfasting, with a dish of strawberries before him. Smith said they were a northern fruit, at their best in Orkney and Sweden. The conversation passed to Edinburgh, its high houses, dirt, and overcrowding. Smith spoke slightingly of the old town, and said he would like to remove to George Square. Then he talked of the scenery, soil, and climate of Scotland, and of the corn trade, which led him to denounce Pitt’s Government for refusing to supply France with a quantity of corn so small that it would not have fed Edinburgh for one day.