two eldest daughters, Jane and Margaret, both died, in the bloom of youth, leaving only the third daughter, Martha, who not long after married Dr. Patrick Carmichael, a Glasgow physician, and youngest son of Professor Gershom Carmichael. This marriage added much to the comfort of Reid’s later years.
We have a passing glimpse of Reid in 1773, when he was entertained in Glasgow by Johnson and Boswell, at the Saracen’s Head Inn, in the Gallowgate, 'that paragon of inns in the eyes of the Scotch, but wretchedly managed.' The travellers arrived there on the 28th of October, on their return from their romantic excursion to the Western Highlands. At the Saracen’s Head, on the following morning, as Boswell tells us, 'Dr. Reid, the philosopher, and two other Glasgow professors, breakfasted with us,' and they met them afterwards at supper. 'I was not much pleased with any of them,' the sage wrote to Mrs. Thrale. 'The general impression upon my memory,' Boswell says, '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.' It is a pity that Boswell's indifference, or indolence, on this occasion has deprived us of talk at the Saracen’s Head and in the College Court, as dramatic in its way as the pictures of Rasay or Inch Kenneth. Notwithstanding Reid's cautious and modest silence, or want of vivacity, he surely said and heard something at those Glasgow breakfasts and suppers.
Before death had put an end to the letters to the Skenes, Reid had become intimate with one of the most notable
