Hume to Adam Smith.
"Ninewells, 29th June, 1761.
"Dear Smith,—As your professorship of Hebrew is vacant, I have been applied to in behalf of young Mr. Cummin; and you are the person with whom I am supposed to have some interest. But as I imagine you will not put this election on the footing of interest, I shall say nothing on that head; but shall speak much more to the purpose by informing you, that I have known Mr. Cummin for some time, and have esteemed him a young man of exceeding good
capacity, and of a turn towards literature. He tells me that he has made the oriental tongues, and particularly the Hebrew, a part of his study, and has made some proficiency in them. But of this fact, craving his pardon, I must be allowed to entertain some doubt; for if Hebrew roots, as Cowley says, thrive best in barren soil,[90:1] he has a small chance of producing any great crop of them. But as you commonly regard the professorship of Hebrew as a step towards other professorships, in which a good capacity can better display itself, you will permit me to give it as my opinion, that you will find it difficult to pitch on a young man, who is more likely to be a credit to your college, by his knowledge and industry.
"I am so far on my road to London, where I hope to see you this season. I shall lodge in Miss Elliot's, Lisle Street, Leicester Fields; and I beg it of you to let me hear from you the moment of your arrival."[90:2]
In 1761, commenced Hume's acquaintance with Madame de Boufflers. It afterwards ripened into a friendship, of which we cannot fully estimate the nature, without looking not only at the character and position of the parties, but at some conventional notions of morality, to which Hume had been, previously, a stranger. Hyppolyte de Saujon, Comtesse de Boufflers-Rouvel, is not to be confounded with her contemporary the Marquise de Boufflers-Rémencourt, mother of the witty Chevalier de Boufflers. The prominent difference between them is but too startlingly characteristic of the moral atmosphere in which they both lived—that the former was mistress of the
Prince of Conti, while the latter is supposed to have held the same relation to Prince Stanislaus Augustus of Poland, of whose court she was the great ornament and attraction. A friendship between a respectable Scotsman of letters and a person in Madame de Boufflers' position, is apt to excite a smile or a frown, according to the habits or temper of the reader. Hume himself was not likely to take the most austere view of the matter; and must have felt, at any rate, that the scandal and even the blame of such connexions must be greatly affected by the countenance they receive from the society to which the parties belong. On the vileness of this code of organized immorality, it would be superfluous, at this hour, to enlarge; but there is a great difference between those who act up to the standard of a low social system and those who do the same acts in breach of a higher code. A Mahomedan who keeps a harem in Constantinople is inferior in his tone of morality to an English gentleman, of good domestic conduct; but he is infinitely superior to an Englishman with a harem in Piccadilly.
The lady in question undoubtedly held a very high station in the best society of Paris; and at that time, and in that country, it is certain that such attachments, if permanent and decorous, and in a very high class of society, acquired a more than tolerated respectability. In 1769, Madame de Boufflers speaks of her attachment as one of twenty years' duration. Early in life, and soon after her marriage, she had been placed at the court of the Duchess of Orleans: but quarrelling with that princess, she came under the protection of the Prince of Conti. Of course, her correspondence bears no mark of her having been subjected to slights, or of her dreading them; or indeed of any suspicion that there was any thing in her position to prevent
her from being rigid in her ideas of virtue, and a teacher of social duties. On her visit to England, she was well received by the British aristocracy, and was even honoured by a laudatory growl from Johnson. We find her exchanging visits with the Marchioness of Hertford, the wife of the English ambassador, one of the purest of that portion of the English female aristocracy which had not suffered taint. In one of her letters to Hume, she describes the death-bed of the prince's mother; speaks of her displaying the heroism of a grand-daughter of the great Condé; and talks with tearful gratitude of the early kindness of that princess to herself, and of her attempts to pay the debt by solacing her old age, and performing to her the last duties which the living receive from each other. It is in all its spirit the letter of a daughter-in-law.
The prince, though a generous and kind-hearted man, could not be prevailed on to make her his wife on her husband's death; but when he died in 1776, he had raised no princess over her head. We shall find that she made Hume the confidant in her griefs and disappointments, and the adviser in her difficulties. There is a great air of earnestness and solicitude in these appeals; and though we cannot help presuming, that a woman so full in her disclosures to a foreigner, living among a people of totally different habits and morals, must have distributed a still larger portion of her confidential revelations nearer home; yet it is evident that she had much reliance on Hume's counsel, and perhaps he was not ill fitted for a father-confessor to such a penitent.