‘Needham pretend que toute generation ne vient qu de fermentation. Je vous dis mon autheur, vous le connoissez; il ne parle legerment.
‘Cette decouverte me paroit valoir la peine a examiner; ce pourroit étre du gibier, come dit Montagne, de M. Diderot. Si la fermentation dans une petite bouteille produit un tres petit animal: celle de tous les élements de notre globe, ne pourroit elle produire, un chêne, un élephant. Je proteste que je parle avec toute soumission à David Hume F—i D⸺i, et à la sainte Inquisition, s’il trouve que quelque chose cloche dans ce sistême, que je ne fais que raporter. bon soir.’
Other letters to Hume occur in 1765, and are preserved in the Library of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. ‘I am going down hill very fast, but easily, as one that descends the Mont Cenis ramassé, without pain or trouble.’ He mentions the frost and snow at Berlin as severe to un pobre viejo Cristiano Español. He sends turnip seed, a bucolic gift, to Helvetius, and to Madame de Vassé, the lady who concealed Prince Charles in the Convent of St. Joseph.[32]
He mentions that he sups every night with the King, and wishes Hume to share these festivals.
The Earl was infinitely happier with Frederick and the gay freethinkers at Potsdam than in Scotland, where so many friendly heads had fallen, where every sight recalled unhappy things; where the lairds drank too much, and the ministers preached too long, and wits were scarce, and people wanted him to marry and beget heirs (here he had Frederick’s sympathy), and still the cracked old bell kept up its peevish lament, Disloyal, Loyal, Loyal, Disloyal!
Such was the Earl’s correspondence with Hume; they are the letters of a kind, good, humorous old pagan. To d’Alembert also he wrote freely. ‘I have read with much pleasure four volumes of your works, and was really pleased with myself when I found that I could understand them. I want to use my rights as an old fellow, and tell anecdotes.’ Then he gives a Scotch story, which would be more amusing in Scots than in his French. Of Frederick, he says that (unlike Carlyle) he is ‘gey easy to live wi’,’ l’homme du monde le plus aisé à vivre. He announces ‘David Hume is elevated to the sublime dignity of a Saint, by public acclamation: the street where he dwells is entitled La rue de St. David. Vox populi, vox Dei. Amen.’ Again,—the old sinner!—
‘I have received an inestimable treasure, plenary indulgences in articulo mortis, with power to bestow some of them on twelve elect souls. One I send to good David Hume; as I wish you all good things in both worlds, I offer you a place among my chosen.’
The philosopher took a simple pleasure in drolleries which no longer tempt us—we have now been so long emancipated.
The Earl said that in Spain he would have felt obliged to denounce Frederick to the Inquisition. Frederick has given the old exile medicines to make him love him, as Prince Hal did to Falstaff. ‘If he had not bewitched me, would I stay here, where I only see a spectre of the sun, when I might live and die in the happy climate of Valencia?’
So he slipped down the hill in a happy, kind old age. In summer he rose at five, read for an hour, wrote his letters, and burned most of those which he received. Then he had his head shaved, and washed in cold water, dressed, took a drive, or pottered in his garden. Heaven made gardens, surely, for the pottering peace of virtuous eld. At twelve he dined, chiefly on vegetables, taking but one glass of sherry. He had always four or five guests, and, after dinner, left them ‘to make the coffee’—that is, to enjoy a siesta. He never remembered to have remained awake a moment when once his head touched the pillow. Then he took coffee, played piquet, pottered again in the garden, supped on chocolate, and so to bed early. He read much, and thanked a slight loss of memory for the pleasure of being able to read all his favourite authors over again. Rabelais, Montaigne, and Molière were his favourites in French, in English, Shakspeare and the old dramatists. Terence and Plautus he studied in Latin, the Greek writers ‘in cribs.’ Tragedy he could not abide; mirth he loved, and d’Alembert’s informant had come on him laughing aloud when alone. He was full of anecdote, and, having known everybody of note for some seventy years, his talk was delightful. For music, he preferred the pibroch in a strange land, as did Charles, alone and old in Italy. One touch of nature!