... interest in the "atheistic" philosophical works of David Hume. In the event he relinquished his scholarship and returned north to Edinburgh in 1746. Back in Edinburgh, and with the sponsorship of the lawyer and philosopher Lord Kames, he was facilitated in giving a number of public lectures. These lectures brought him to the attention of the intellectual public. In 1751, at age twenty-eight, he became a professor of Logic at Glasgow, and then, the following year, took the more remunerative Chair of Moral Philosophy. Smith was a reserved, bookish, and absent minded individual. Though often awkward in social situations he acquired a great reputation as an interesting and animated lecturer. In his lecturing he followed Francis Hutcheson's example of lecturing in English rather than the traditional scholarly language - Latin. Glasgow, in these years was a center of the "Scottish Enlightenment", and in his spare time Smith was known ...

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