After their high controversies in the Literary Society and their keener but less noble contentions in the Senate Hall, the Glasgow professors used to unbend their bows again in the simple convivialities of “Mr. Robin Simson’s Club.”  Mr. Robin Simson was the venerable Professor of Mathematics, equally celebrated and beloved, known through all the world for his rediscovery of the porisms of Euclid, but in Glasgow College—­whose bounds he rarely quitted—­the delight of all hearts for the warmth, breadth, and uprightness of his character, for the charming simplicity of his manner, and the richness of his weighty and sparkling conversation.  It was his impressions of Simson that first gave Smith the idea that mathematicians possessed a specific amiability and happiness of disposition which placed them above the jealousies and vanities and intrigues of the lower world.  For fifty years Simson’s life was spent almost entirely within the two quadrangles of Glasgow College; between the rooms he worked and slept in, the tavern at the gate, where he ate his meals, and the College gardens, where he took his daily walk of a fixed number of hundred paces, of which, according to some well-known anecdotes, he always kept count as he went, even under the difficulties of interruption.  Mr. Robin, who was unmarried, never went into general society, but after his geometrical labours were over finished the day with a rubber of whist in the tavern at the College gate.  Here one or another of the professors used to join him, and the little circle eventually ripened into a regular club, which met for supper at this tavern every Friday evening, and went out to Anderston for dinner on Saturday.  It was then known as the Anderston Club, as well as by its former designation from the name of its founder.  Anderston was at that time quite a country village.  It was very soon afterwards made busy enough with the cotton factory of James Monteith, but at this time Tames Monteith’s father was using the spot as a market garden.  It contained, however, a cosy little “change-house,” capable of providing the simple dinner then in vogue.  The dinner consisted of only one course.  Mr. M’George says the first dinner of two courses ever given in Glasgow was given in 1786; and Principal M’Cormick of St. Andrews, writing Dr. Carlyle about that date, praises the dinner-parties of St. Andrews to the skies, but says nobody gave two courses except Mrs. Prebendary Berkeley, and Mrs. Prebendary Berkeley was the daughter-in-law of a bishop.  The course at the Anderston dinner, moreover, consisted every week of the same dish; it was invariably chicken-broth, which Smollett classes with haggis, singed sheepshead, fish and sauce, and minced collops, as one of the five national dishes of Scotland.  He describes it as “a very simple preparation enriched with eggs in such a manner as to give the air of a spoiled fricassee”; but adds that “notwithstanding its appearance, it is very delicate and nourishing.”  The