I gave little attention to it at that time, but upon further consideration should be glad to listen to any proposal of that kind.  The reasons of my changing my opinion I shall tell you at meeting.  I need not recommend secrecy to you upon this head.  Be so good as to thank the Principal in my name for his kindness in mentioning me to the Duke.  I waited on him at his levee at Edinburgh, when I was introduced to him by Mr. Lind, but it seems he had forgot.

     I can tell you nothing particular about your own affair more
     than what I wrote you last till I see Mr. Home, whom I
     expect every moment.—­I am, most dear sir, ever yours,

     A. SMITH.

The event they were afraid of happened on the 27th of November, and Smith was, without any opposition, appointed Craigie’s successor on the 29th of April 1752.  It would appear from this letter as if Cullen had heard from his colleague, Professor Lindsay, of a possible rival to Smith for that chair in the person of Mr. Elliot—­no doubt Mr. Gilbert Elliot, a man of brilliant parts and accomplishments, who afterwards attained high political eminence as Sir Gilbert Elliot, but who was at this time a young advocate at the Edinburgh bar, with no liking for law and a great liking for letters and philosophy.  Smith, however, who was a personal friend of Elliot’s, knew that the latter had no such designs, and eventually his own candidature was unopposed.  But in anticipation of this result, the keenest contest was carried on all winter over the election to the Logic chair, which he was to leave.  David Hume came forward as a candidate, and there is an erroneous, though curiously well-supported tradition that Edmund Burke was a candidate also.  One of Burke’s biographers, Bisset, states that Burke actually applied for the post, but applied too late.[29] Another of his biographers, Prior, says that Burke being in Scotland at the time, took some steps for the place, but finding his chances hopeless, withdrew;[30] while Professor Jardine, a subsequent occupier of the chair himself, asserts that Burke was thought of by some of the electors, but never really came forward.[31] But Smith, who was not only the previous occupant of the office, but, as Professor of Moral Philosophy, was one of the electors of his successor, stated explicitly to Dugald Stewart (as Stewart wrote to Prior[32]) “that the story was extremely current, but he knew of no evidence on which it rested, and he suspected it took its rise entirely from an opinion which he had himself expressed at Glasgow upon the publication of Burke’s book on the Sublime and Beautiful, that the author of that book would be a great acquisition to the College if he would accept of a chair.”  Had anything been known in Glasgow of Burke’s candidature for a chair there five years before, it would unquestionably be recollected on the occasion of the publication of so notable a work, but Burke’s very name was so unfamiliar to the circle interested in the election that when Hume first met him in London in 1759, he mentions him in a letter to Smith as “a Mr. Burke, an Irish gentleman who has written a very pretty book on the Sublime and Beautiful."[33]