As appropriate to his popularity among women and young people, the following anecdotes from the pen of one who has gained no little celebrity by her genius, cannot fail to give interest. They are contained in a
letter by Lady Anne Lindsay, authoress of the song Auld Robin Gray , when she was a young lady living in her grandmother's house in Edinburgh, to her sister Margaret:—
Dinners go on as usual, which, being monopolized by the divines, wits, and writers of the present day, are not unjustly called the Dinners of the Eaterati, by Lord Kellie, who laughs at his own pun till his face is purple.
Our friend, David Hume, along with his friend, Principal Robertson, continue to maintain their ground at these convivial meetings. To see the lion and the lamb lying down together, the deist and the doctor, is extraordinary; it makes one hope that some day Hume will say to him, "Thou almost persuadest me to be a Christian." He is a constant morning visiter of ours. My mother jested him lately on a circumstance which had a good deal of character in it.
When we were very young girls, too young to remember the scene, there happened to be a good many clever people at Balcarres at Christmas; and as a gambol of the season, they agreed to write each his own character, to give them to Hume, and make him show them to my father, as extracts he had taken from the pope's library at Rome.[445:1]
He did. My father said, "I don't know who the rest of your fine fellows and charming princesses are, Hume; but if you had not told me where you got this character, I should have said it was that of my wife."
"I was pleased," said my mother, "with my lord's answer, it showed that at least I had been an honest woman."
"Hume's character of himself," said she, "was well drawn and full of candour; he spoke of himself as he ought;" but added, what surprised us all, that, "plain as his manners were, and apparently careless of attention, vanity was his predominant weakness. That vanity led him to publish his Essays, which he grieved over; not that he had changed his opinions, but that he thought he had injured society by disseminating them."
"Do you remember the sequel of that affair?" said Hume.
"Yes, I do," replied my mother, laughing: "you told me