When it became evident that the sickness was to prove mortal, Smith’s old friend Adam Ferguson, who had been apparently estranged from him for some time, immediately forgot their coolness, whatever it was about, and came and waited on him with the old affection.  “Your friend Smith,” writes Ferguson on 31st July 1790, announcing the death to Sir John Macpherson, Warren Hastings’ successor as Governor-General of India—­“your old friend Smith is no more.  We knew he was dying for some months, and though matters, as you know, were a little awkward when he was in health, upon that appearance I turned my face that way and went to him without further consideration, and continued my attentions to the last."[369]

Dr. Carlyle mentions that the harmony of the famous Edinburgh literary circle of last century was often ruffled by little tifts, which he and John Home were generally called in to compose, and that the usual source of the trouble was Ferguson’s “great jealousy of rivals,” and especially of his three more distinguished friends, Hume, Smith, and Robertson.  But it would not be right to ascribe the fault to Ferguson merely on that account, for Carlyle hints that Smith too had “a little jealousy in his nature,” although he admits him to have been a man of “unbounded benevolence.”  But whatever it was that had come between them, it is pleasant to find Ferguson dismissing it so unreservedly, and forgetting his own infirmities too—­for he had been long since hopelessly paralysed, and went about, Cockburn tells us, buried in furs “like a philosopher from Lapland”—­in order to cheer the last days of the friend of his youth.

When Smith felt his end to be approaching he evinced great anxiety to have all his papers destroyed except the few which he judged to be in a sufficiently finished state to deserve publication, and being apparently too feeble to undertake the task himself, he repeatedly begged his friends Black and Hutton to destroy them for him.  A third friend, Mr. Riddell, was present on one of the occasions when this request was made, and mentions that Smith expressed regret that “he had done so little.”  “But I meant,” he said, “to have done more, and there are materials in my papers of which I could have made a great deal, but that is now out of the question."[370] Black and Hutton always put off complying with Smith’s entreaties in the hope of his recovering his health or perhaps changing his mind; but at length, a week before his death, he expressly sent for them, and asked them then and there to burn sixteen volumes of manuscript to which he directed them.  This they did without knowing or asking what they contained.  It will be remembered that seventeen years before, when he went up to London with the manuscript of the Wealth of Nations, he made Hume his literary executor, and left instructions with him to destroy all his loose papers and eighteen thin paper folio books “without any examination,” and to spare nothing but his