ar's
endurance, diversified latterly with pecuniary squabbles, in which
Hume's tenacity about a somewhat small claim is remarkable, the
engagement came to an end.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A picture of the house, taken from Drummond's _History of Noble
British Families_, is to be seen in Chambers's _Book of Days_ (April
26th); and if, as Drummond says, "It is a favourable specimen of the
best Scotch lairds' houses," all that can be said is worst Scotch lairds
must have been poorly lodged indeed.

[2] Mr. John Hill Burton, in his valuable _Life of Hume_, on which, I
need hardly say, I have drawn freely for the materials of the present
biographical sketch.

[3] One cannot but be reminded of young Descartes' renunciation of study
for soldiering.

[4] _My Own Life._

[5] Letter to Gilbert Elliot of Minto, 1751. "So vast an undertaking,
planned before I was one-and-twenty, and composed before twenty-five,
must necessarily be very defective. I have repented my haste a hundred
and a hundred times."

[6] So says Mr. Burton, and that he is right is proved by a letter of
Hume's, dated February 13, 1739, in which he writes, "'Tis now a
fortnight since my book was published." But it is a curious illustration
of the value of testimony, that Hume, in _My Own Life_, states: "In the
end of 1738 I published my Treatise, and immediately went down to my
mother and my brother."

[7] Burton, _Life_, vol. i. p. 109.

CHAPTER II.

LATER YEARS: THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

In 1744, Hume's friends had endeavoured to procure his nomination to the
Chair of "Ethics and pneumatic philosophy"[8] in the University of
Edinburgh. About this matter he writes to his friend William Mure:--

"The accusation of heresy, deism, scepticism, atheism, &c., &c.,
&c. was started against me; but never took, being bore down by the
contrary authority of all the good company in town."

If the "good company in town" bore down the first three of these
charges, it is to be hoped, for the sake of their veracity, that they
knew their candidate chiefly as the very good company that he always
was; and had paid as little attention, as good company usually does, to
so solid a work as the _Treatise_. Hume expresses a naive surprise, not
unmixed with indignation, that Hutcheson and Leechman, both clergymen
and sincere, though liberal, professors of orthodoxy, should have
expressed doubts as to his fitness for becoming a professedly
presbyterian teach