Parliament. A duty of five shillings and fourpence per chaldron, says Knox, was levied on coal at ports; none on inland coal. It had to be landed at a port where there is a custom-house, and might than be re-shipped for some other place in the neighbourhood.[1] Custom-houses were few and far between, so that in many cases, if coal was used at all, it would have had to be twice landed and twice shipped. On this mischievous regulation Adam Smith remarks: "Where coals are naturally cheap they are consumed duty free; where they are naturally dear, they are loaded with a heavy duty."[2]
The "Saracen's Head" with its coal fire has disappeared. My boatman had heard the old people talk of it. In this inn the following morning Dr. Reid, the philosopher, and two of the other professors of the University breakfasted with Johnson. He met some of them also at dinner, tea, and supper. "I was not much pleased with any of them," he wrote to Mrs. Thrale. Boswell unfortunately was again lazy with his journal, and kept no record of the talk. Writing long afterwards, he says: "The general impression upon my memory is, that we had not much conversation at Glasgow, where the professors, like their brethren at Aberdeen, did not venture to expose themselves much to the battery of cannon which they knew might play upon them." Reid's silence was perhaps merely due to that reserve which he generally shewed among strangers.[3] Had fate been kinder, the great Clow might have been still among them, who twenty-two years before had been preferred both to Hume and Burke as Adam Smith's successor in the Chair of Logic.[4] The story of the Billingsgate altercation between Smith and Johnson, recorded by Sir Walter Scott, is wholly untrue. Smith was not at this time in Glasgow. It is, no doubt, one of those tales about Johnson in which Scotch invention was humorously displayed. It was, perhaps, meant as a reply to the question which one day, in London, he put to Adam Smith, who was boasting of Glasgow, "Pray, sir, have you ever seen Brentford?" Boswell says: "I put him in mind of it to-day while he expressed his admiration of the elegant buildings, and whispered him, 'Don't you feel some remorse?' 'Smith's pride in the city where he had spent more than three years as a student, and twelve as a professor, was assuredly well-founded. Johnson calls it
