The poet was not far wrong in describing him as ‘a man positively of the first abilities and greatest strength of mind, as well as one of the best hearts and keenest wits that I have met with.’ He had displayed his intellectual power in his _Philosophy of Natural History_, long regarded as a standard work, and in writing large sections of the original _Encyclopædia Britannica_; his wit he reserved for conversation, where, like Burns’s, it allowed no considerations of reverence or prudery to stand in its way. Despite his rough exterior, he was able to captivate an intelligent woman of the world like Maria Riddell, as well as the ebullient poet. But the records of this friendship were too much for Smellie’s squeamish executors; his biographer piously relates that ‘many letters of Burns to Mr. Smellie which remained, being totally unfit for publication, and several of them containing severe reflections on many respectable people still in life, have been burnt.’ The records of another friendship which had its start among the Edinburgh bookmen fared better. Peter Hill, five years the poet’s senior, was in 1787 a clerk in Creech’s shop, but was soon to set up in business for himself and prove a kindly and indulgent master to an apprentice named Archibald Constable. Hill’s was one of the few friendships Burns made in Edinburgh which suffered no abatement with time. From the summer of 1787, when Hill was handling some of the innumerable details of business relating to the Edinburgh _Poems_, until the beginning of 1796, when Burns sent his ‘annual’ gift of a kippered salmon from the Nith, their association was unclouded. Hill supplied the poet with books, sent presents to his family, and took care of miscellaneous business errands in the city. Burns secured for Hill the book-orders, first of the Monkland Friendly Society and later of the Dumfries Public Library, and interspersed his business communications with hearty blasts of execration, broad humour, and messages to all their common friends. Though the phraseology of the letters often seems stilted, behind its stiffness glows a genuine affection and esteem. But the backbone of the Fencibles was the lawyers. Their Colonel, William Dunbar, was a jolly little bachelor some years older than the poet; their Major and Muster-Master General was Charles Hay, friend of Boswell in the days when the latter was striving for distinction at the Scottish bar, whose port-inflamed countenance blinks above his judicial robes as Lord Newton in Raeburn’s superb portrait in the Scottish National Gallery. More notable for ‘law, paunch, whist, claret, and worth’ than for literary interests, Hay’s one poetic suggestion to Burns had humiliating results. He was among those who urged the poet to compose the unfortunate elegy ‘On the Death of Lord President Dundas’, the complete ignoring of which by Dundas’s son inflicted on Burns’s pride a wound which never healed.