During these thirteen years at Glasgow Smith kept up his connection with Edinburgh by pretty constant visits. Shorn of royalty by the union of crowns, and of its parliament by the union of parliaments, Edinburgh was slowly recovering in trade what it had lost in political significance. It had kept its Courts of Justice, and its boards of customs and excise. Above all, it was the centre of an intellectual activity which gave Scotland for the first time a name and a fame in European philosophy and letters. The social and intellectual leader of the new movement was Smith’s early friend and benefactor, Henry Home, who was raised to the bench as Lord Kames in 1752, a man of very liberal and progressive ideas, full of patriotic schemes for the improvement of Scottish art, manufactures, and agriculture. His writings, though highly praised for their learning, have long been forgotten, for sufficient reason. “I am afraid of Kames’s _Law Tracts_,” Hume once wrote to Smith. “The man might as well think of making a fine sauce by a mixture of wormwood and aloes as an agreeable combination by joining metaphysics and Scottish Law.” Robertson, already a prominent preacher and ecclesiastical politician, was feeling his way towards Edinburgh and literary fame. John Home, a brother minister, was composing the _Tragedy of Douglas_, counted by Hume, so he told Smith in 1756, “the best, and by French critics the only tragedy in our language.” Another member of this circle, quite a fashionable oddity, who ploughed his own glebe like a peasant, and startled a passer-by with apt quotations from Theocritus, was Wilkie, the author of the _Epigoniad_, a particular friend and admirer of our philosopher. Then there were the two Dalrymples, both historians, and the gossipy autobiographer, Dr. Carlyle. Three politicians of distinction often adorned Edinburgh society at this time: brilliant Charles Townshend, who was to make a revolution in Smith’s life, James Oswald, his old friend and neighbour, and William Johnstone (Sir William Pulteney). Among the relics of Smith’s correspondence is an introductory letter, dated January 19, 1752, to Oswald, then at the Board of Trade, which “will be delivered to you by Mr. William Johnstone, son of Sir James Johnstone of Westerhall, a young gentleman whom I have known intimately these four years, and of whose discretion, good temper, sincerity, and honour, I have had during all that time frequent proof.” The young gentleman was to give a further signal proof of his discretion by bestowing his affections on a Pulteney, whose vast fortune doubtless consoled him for the surrender of his name. The letter continues:—