After seeing the Wealth of Nations through the press, Smith lingered a few weeks in London. He was anxious to persuade Hume to come up and consult the London physicians, but Hume shrank from the journey, and implored his friend to return to Edinburgh. So about the middle of April, Smith and John Home[37] took the coach for Edinburgh. But at Morpeth, where the coach stopped, they saw Hume’s servant at the door of the inn. Hume had changed his mind, and was on his way to see Sir John Pringle. Home returned with Hume to London, but Smith, hearing that his aged mother was ill, went on to Kirkcaldy. Before parting, however, the two friends carefully discussed the question of what should be done with Hume’s papers in the event of his death. From a desire to avoid religious controversy and public clamour, Hume had kept by him unpublished his Dialogues on Natural Religion; and he now tried to persuade his friend and literary executor to edit them after his death.
But Smith resolutely declined the task. Although he had himself lectured on Natural Religion, he had warily avoided the subject in his own publications. Moreover, he was now hoping to be appointed to an office under the Crown, and such a publication would certainly be prejudicial. Hume argued that these objections were groundless: “Was Mallet anywise hurt by his publication of Lord Bolingbroke? He received an office afterwards from the present king, and Lord Bute, the most prudent man in the world, and he always justified himself by his sacred regard to the will of a dead friend.” And he reminded Smith of a saying of Rochefoucauld, that “a wind, though it extinguishes a candle, blows up a fire.” So he wrote from London at the beginning of May. However, he agreed to leave the question of publication entirely to Smith’s discretion. “By the little company I have seen,” he added, “I find the town very full of your book, which meets with general approbation.” Soon afterwards Hume changed his mind, and made Strahan his literary executor, with instructions to publish the Dialogues within two and a half years.
In July the two friends were again in Edinburgh, conversing together. Smith was deeply impressed by the philosophic courage, and even gaiety, with which the great sceptic faced the approach of death. In the well-known letter to Strahan,[38] that is always printed with Hume’s autobiography, he mentions among other touching incidents that a certain Colonel Edmondstone paid a farewell visit to Hume, but afterwards could not forbear writing a last letter “applying to him as to a dying man the beautiful French verses in which the Abbé Chaulieu, in expectation of his own death, laments his approaching separation from his friend the Marquis de la Fare.” “Mr. Hume’s magnanimity and firmness were such,” continued Smith, “that his most affectionate friends knew that they hazarded nothing in talking or writing to him as a dying man, and that, far from being hurt by this frankness, he was rather pleased and flattered with it.”
At the end of the first week of August, Hume had now become so very weak that the company of his most intimate friends fatigued him:—
“At his own desire, therefore, I agreed to leave Edinburgh, and returned to my mother’s house here at Kirkcaldy, upon condition that he would send for me whenever he wished to see me; the physician who saw him most frequently, Dr. Black, undertaking in the meantime to write me occasionally an account of the state of his health.”
The correspondence which followed marks the close of a deep, unbroken, and memorable attachment. On August 15th Hume’s anxiety for the Dialogues revived: “On revising them (which I have not done these five years) I find that nothing can be more cautiously and more artfully written. You had certainly forgotten them. Will you permit me to leave you the property of the copy, in case they should not be published in five years after my decease? Be so good as write me an answer soon.” On the 22nd Smith replied:—
“I have this moment received yr. letter of the 15th inst. You had, in order to save me the sum of one penny sterling, sent it by the carrier instead of the Post, and (if you have not mistaken the date) it has lain at his quarters these eight days, and was, I presume, very likely to lie there for ever.”
Then, after reassuring Hume about the Dialogues, he continued:—
“If you will give me leave I will add a few lines to yr. account of your own life, giving some account in my own name of your behaviour in this illness, if, contrary to my own hopes, it should prove your last. Some conversations we had lately together, particularly that concerning your want of an excuse to make to Charon, the excuse you at last thought of, and the very bad reception wh. Charon was likely to give it, would, I imagine, make no disagreeable part of the history. You have in a declining state of health, under an exhausting disease, for more than two years together now looked at the approach of death with a steady cheerfulness such as very few men have been able to maintain for a few hours, tho’ otherwise in the most perfect Health. I shall likewise, if you give me leave, correct the sheets of the new edition of your works, and shall take care that it shall be published exactly according to your last corrections. As I shall be at London this winter, it will cost me very little trouble.”
But “the cool and steady Dr. Black” still gave him some hopes of his friend’s recovery. On the following day Hume dictated a brief answer to this letter, explaining that he had only taken an extra precaution in case anything might happen to Strahan. “You are too good,” he added, “in thinking any trifles that concern me are so much worthy of your attention, but I give you entire liberty to make what additions you please to the account of my life.”