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 Will you permit me to leave you the property of the copy, in case they should not be published in five years after my decease?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:—