paragraphs, and the only facts in his life the writers appear to have been able to find were his early abduction by the gipsies, of which both the Mercury and the Advertiser give a circumstantial account, and the characteristics which the Advertiser mentions, that “in private life Dr. Smith was distinguished for philanthropy, benevolence, humanity, and charity.”  Lord Cockburn, who was then beginning to read and think, was struck with the general ignorance of Smith’s merits which his fellow-citizens exhibited shortly after his death.  “The middle-aged seemed to me to know little about the founder of the science (political economy) except that he had recently been a Commissioner of Customs and had written a sensible book.  The young—­by which I mean the Liberal young of Edinburgh—­lived upon him."[373] Stewart was no sooner dead than a monument was raised to him on one of the best sites in the city.  The greater name of Smith has to this day no public monument in the city he so long adorned.

Black and Hutton were his literary executors, and published in 1795 the literary fragments which had been spared from the flames.  By his will, dated 6th February 1790, he left his whole property to his cousin, David Douglas, afterwards Lord Reston, subject to the condition that the legatee should follow the instructions of Black and Hutton in disposing of the MSS. and writings, and pay an annuity of L20 a year to Mrs. Janet Douglas, and after her death, a sum of L400 to Professor Hugh Cleghorn of St. Andrews and his wife.[374] The property Smith left, however, was very moderate, and his friends could not at first help expressing some surprise that it should have been so little, because, though known to be very hospitable, he had never maintained anything more than a moderate establishment.  But they had not then known, though many of them had long suspected, that he gave away large sums in secret charity.  William Playfair mentions that Smith’s friends, suspecting him of doing this, had sometimes in his lifetime formed special juries for the purpose of discovering evidences of it, but that the economist was “so ingenious in concealing his charity” that they never could discover it from witnesses, though they often found the strongest circumstantial evidence of it.[375] Dugald Stewart was more fortunate.  He says:  “Some very affecting instances of Mr. Smith’s beneficence in cases where he found it impossible to conceal entirely his good offices have been mentioned to me by a near relation of his and one of his most confidential friends, Miss Ross, daughter of the late Patrick Ross, Esq., of Innernethy.  They were all on a scale much beyond what would have been expected from his fortune, and were combined with circumstances equally honourable to the delicacy of his feelings and the liberality of his heart.”  One recalls the saying of Sir James Mackintosh, who was a student of Cullen and Black’s in Smith’s closing years, and used occasionally to meet the economist in private society.  “I have known,” said Mackintosh to Empson many years after this—­“I have known Adam Smith slightly, Ricardo well, and Malthus intimately.  Is it not something to say for a science that its three greatest masters were about the three best men I ever knew?"[376]