On the bench he had “the obstinacy of a mule and the levity of a harlequin,” said a counsel; but his broad jokes with his broad dialect found favour in an age when everything was forgiven to pungency. He wrote much on many themes. If you want to know a subject write a book on it, said he, a precept which may be excellent from the author’s point of view, but what about the reader?—but who reads him now? Yet it was his to be praised, or, at any rate, criticised. Adam Smith said, we must all acknowledge him as our master. And Pitt and his circle told this same Adam Smith that they were all his scholars. Boswell once urged his merits on Johnson. “We have at least Lord Kames,” he ruefully pleaded. The leviathan frame shook with ponderous mirth, “Keep him, ha, ha, ha, we don’t envy you him.” In far-off Ferney, Voltaire read the _Elements of Criticism_, and was mighty wroth over some cutting remarks on the _Henriade_. He sneered at those rules of taste from the far north “By Lord Mackames, a Justice of the Peace in Scotland.” You suspect that “master of scoffing” had spelt name and office right enough had he been so minded. Kames bid farewell to his colleagues in December 1782 with, if the story be right, a quaintly coarse expression. He died eight days after in a worthier frame of mind—he wrote and studied to his last hour. “What,” he said, “am I to sit idle with my tongue in my cheek till death comes for me?” He expressed a stern satisfaction that he was not to survive his mental powers, and he wished to be away. He was curious as to the next world, and the tasks that he would have yet to do. There is something heroic about this strange old man.