It will be remembered that when Captain Waverley crossed the border, five years later, on his way to join the Young Pretender, the houses of Tully Veolan seemed miserable in the extreme, “especially to an eye accustomed to the smiling neatness of English cottages.” Smith rode through Carlisle, and he told Samuel Rogers in 1789 that he recollected being much struck as he approached that town by the richness of England and by the superiority of English agriculture. England indeed was then remarkably prosperous, thanks to a long peace, low taxes, and good harvests. Food was generally cheap and plentiful. Trade was good; and better means of transit by road and canal were being developed. But the land of the Scots, “during fifty generations the rudest perhaps of all European nations, the most necessitous, the most turbulent, and the most unsettled,” was still unimproved. The roads were almost impassable for wheeled vehicles. Coaches were unknown.[3] Many of the most fertile tracts were waste, and there is respectable authority for the opinion that some parts of the Lowlands were worse cultivated than in the thirteenth century. Under such conditions, rude beyond conception, poverty was universal. Even the gentry could seldom afford such bare comforts as half a century later their own farmers possessed. As for the common people, clothed in the coarsest garb and starving on the meanest fare, they dwelt in despicable huts with their cattle. It is significant that in those days Scotland had no fatted kine. There was no market for good meat, and the taste only grew with the means for gratifying it. Adam Smith was fond of telling at his own table in after years, how on the first day he dined in the hall of Balliol, having fallen into one of his fits of absent-mindedness, he was roused by the servitor who told him to “fall to, for he had never seen such a piece of beef in Scotland.” Of the hundred undergraduates then at Balliol about eight came from Scotland, and four of these were Snell Exhibitioners. Their peculiarities of manner and dialect marked them off from the rest of the college, and they were treated as foreigners. Their relations with the authorities were unpleasant. In 1744, Smith and the other Exhibitioners stated their grievances to the Senate of Glasgow University, and explained how their residence might be made “more easy and commodious.” A few years afterwards, one of them told the Master that what the Exhibitioners wanted was to be transferred to some other college on account of their “total dislike of Balliol.” The friction between Balliol and Glasgow lasted long, and it was no doubt his own unsatisfactory experience that drew from Adam Smith thirty years afterwards a strong condemnation of close scholarships.[4]