Smith’s own confession is contained in a report of some conversations given in the Bee for 1791.  He was speaking about blank verse, to which he always had a dislike, as we know from an interesting incident mentioned by Boswell.  Boswell, who attended Smith’s lectures on English literature at Glasgow College in 1759, told Johnson four years after that Smith had pronounced a strong opinion in these lectures against blank verse and in favour of rhyme—­always, no doubt, on the same principle that the greater the difficulty the greater the beauty.  This delighted the heart of Johnson, and he said, “Sir, I was once in company with Smith, and we did not take to each other, but had I known that he loved rhyme as much as you tell me he does, I should have hugged him.”  Twenty years later Smith was again expressing to the anonymous interviewer of the Bee his unabated contempt for all blank verse except Milton’s, and he said that though he could never find a single rhyme in his life, he could make blank verse as fast as he could speak.  “Blank verse,” he said; “they do well to call it blank, for blank it is.  I myself even, who never could find a single rhyme in my life, could make blank verse as fast as I could speak.”  The critic would thus appear here again to have been the poet who has failed, though in this case he had the sense to discover the failure without tempting the judgment of the public.

Indeed he had already begun to discover his true vocation, for besides his lectures on English literature, which he delivered for three successive winters, he delivered at least one winter a course on economics; and in this course, written in the year 1749, and delivered in the year 1750-51, Smith advocated the doctrines of commercial liberty on which he was nurtured by Hutcheson, and which he was afterwards to do so much to advance.  He states this fact himself in a paper read before a learned society in Glasgow in 1755, which afterwards fell into the hands of Dugald Stewart, and from which Stewart extracts a passage or two, which I shall quote in a subsequent chapter.  They certainly contain a plain enough statement of the doctrine of natural liberty; and Smith says that a great part of the opinions contained in the paper were “treated of at length in some lectures which I have still by me, and which were written in the hand of a clerk who left my service six years ago”—­that is, in 1749—­and adds that “they had all of them been the subjects of lectures which I read at Edinburgh the winter before I left it, and I can adduce innumerable witnesses both from that place and from this who will ascertain them sufficiently to be mine."[23] These ideas of natural liberty in industrial affairs were actively at work, not only in Smith’s own mind, but in the minds of others in his immediate circle in Scotland in those years 1749 and 1750.  David Hume and James Oswald were then corresponding on the subject, and though it is doubtful whether Smith had seen much or anything of Hume personally at that time (for Hume had been abroad with General St. Clair part of it, and did not live in Edinburgh after his return), it was in those and the two previous years that Smith was first brought into real intellectual contact with his friend and townsman, James Oswald.