But he could not be easy about his papers. In 1773, when he consigned their care to Hume, he had instructed him to destroy without examination all his loose manuscript, together with about eighteen thin paper folio books containing his lectures. When he went to London in 1787 he had given similar instructions to Black and Hutton. Now that he had become very weak, and felt that his days were numbered, he spoke again to them on the same subject. They entreated him to make his mind easy, as he might depend upon their fulfilling his desire. He was satisfied for a time. But some days afterwards—this is Hutton’s account—finding his anxiety not entirely removed, he begged one of them to destroy the volumes immediately. This accordingly was done; and his mind was so much relieved that he was able to receive his friends in the evening with his usual cheerfulness. They had been used to sup with him every Sunday, and that evening there was a pretty numerous company of them. The old man not finding himself able to sit up with them as usual, retired to bed before supper; and as he went away took leave of his friends by saying, “I believe we must adjourn this meeting to some other place.” He died a very few days afterwards, on July the 17th, 1790, and was buried in the Canongate Churchyard, in an obscure spot which must have been overlooked by some of the windows of Panmure House. In his will he had made his cousin, David Douglas (the youngest son of Colonel Douglas of Strathendry), his heir, with instructions to dispose of his manuscripts in accordance with the advice of Black and Hutton. A small but choice library of four or five thousand volumes, and a simple table, to which his friends were always welcome without the formality of an invitation, were, says Dugald Stewart, “the only expenses that could be considered his own.” His acts of private generosity, though sedulously concealed, were on a scale “much beyond what might have been expected from his fortune,” and those who knew only of his frugality were surprised to find how small, in comparison with the income he had long enjoyed, was the property he left behind him. His friends were indignant that the death of so great a thinker made but little stir. They might have been consoled had they been able to look forward twenty years, and read a letter which a German student, Alexander von der Marwitz, wrote to a friend on reading the _Wealth of Nations_. It was on the eve of Jena, and the form of Napoleon stood out a gigantic menace to all that the young patriot held dear. Yet he did not hesitate to compare the victorious author with the conqueror of Europe. “Next to Napoleon he is now the mightiest monarch in Europe.”