We have seen how in the spring of 1759 Charles Townshend was much taken with the _Theory of Moral Sentiments_, and told Oswald he would put his young ward the Duke of Buccleuch under the author’s care. Hume did not at first believe that Townshend would persevere, or if he did, that he would offer such terms as would tempt Smith from Glasgow. But on this occasion he was in earnest and never relinquished the idea, anxious, it is said, to connect the fleeting fame of a parliamentarian with the lasting renown of a philosopher. Townshend had married the widowed Countess of Dalkeith. Her eldest son, the Duke of Buccleuch, was then a boy at Eton, under Hallam, father of the historian. The time when his stepson would leave school was still distant, but Townshend had made up his mind to send the boy abroad. In England it was becoming more and more the fashion for the sons of the nobility to travel abroad when they left school, instead of going to one of the universities. It was thought that they returned home much improved by their travels, and with some knowledge of one or two living languages, whereas if they went to Oxford or Cambridge they would learn nothing but idleness and dissipation. Adam Smith himself afterwards came to the conclusion that foreign travel was no substitute for a sound university training. The schoolboy, he wrote after his continental tour, “commonly returns home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of any serious application either to study or business, than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home.... Nothing but the discredit into which the universities had fallen could ever have brought into repute so very absurd a practice.”[20] In the summer of 1759 Townshend went to see Smith at Glasgow, and apparently prevailed, for in the following September Smith wrote to him about some books which he had been getting for Buccleuch, as if he were already in the position of an educational adviser to the boy. As might have been expected of one whom Burke immortalised as “the delight and ornament of the House, and the charm of every private society which he honoured with his presence,” Townshend captivated Glasgow. “Everybody here remembers you with the greatest admiration and affection.”