Economists -- Great Britain -- Biography; Smith, Adam, 1723-1790
Panmure House is still standing. It is a much more modern structure
than the houses near it, having been built towards the middle of last
century; and although its rooms are now mostly tenantless, and its
garden a cooper's yard, it wears to this day an air of spacious and
substantial comfort which is entirely wanting in the rest of the
neighbourhood. William Windham, the statesman, who dined in it
repeatedly when he was in Edinburgh with Burke in 1785, thought it a
very stately house indeed for a philosopher. "House magnificent," he
enters in his diary, "and place fine," and one can still imagine how
it would appear so when the plastered walls were yet white, and the
eye looked over the long strip of terraced garden on to the soft green
slopes of the Calton. There was then no building of any kind on or
about the Calton Hill, except the Observatory, and Dugald Stewart, who
was very fond of rural scenery, always said that the great charm of
his own house a few closes up was its view of the Calton crags and
braes.
Smith brought over his mother and his cousin, Miss Douglas, from
Kirkcaldy, and a few months later the youngest son of his cousin,
Colonel Douglas of Strathendry, who was to attend school and college
with a view to the bar, and whom he made his heir. Windham, after
visiting them, makes the same note twice in his diary, "Felt strongly
the impression of a family completely Scotch." Smith's house was
noted for its simple and unpretending hospitality. He liked to have
his friends about him without the formality of an invitation, and few
strangers of distinction visited Edinburgh without being entertained
in Panmure House. His Sunday suppers were still remembered and spoken
of in Edinburgh when M'Culloch lived there as a young man. Scotch
Sabbatarianism had not at that time reached the rigour that came in
with the evangelical revival in the beginning of this century, and the
Sunday supper was a regular Edinburgh institution. Even the
Evangelical leaders patronised it. Lord Cockburn and Mrs. Somerville
both speak with very agreeable recollections of the Sunday supper
parties of the Rev. Sir Harry Moncreiff, and Boswell mentions being
invited to one by another Evangelical leader, Dr. Alexander Webster.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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