The visit was now drawing to an end, but our account of it would be incomplete if we omitted Smith’s part in one of the most furious squabbles of the century. Rousseau had arrived in Paris almost simultaneously with our travellers, tempted by Hume’s generous promise to find him a refuge in England from his persecutors. The advent of the author of the _Social Contract_ and _Émile_ threw Paris into a tumult of excitement. “People may talk of ancient Greece as they please,” wrote Hume, full of affection and enthusiasm for his _protégé_, “but no nation was ever so proud of genius as this, and no person ever so much engaged their attention as Rousseau. Voltaire and everybody else are quite eclipsed by him.” The philosophers of Paris predicted a quarrel before they got to Calais, but for some time Hume contrived to manage this wayward, suspicious genius admirably well, procuring him a pension and a comfortable establishment in Derbyshire. At last, in June, Rousseau suddenly lost his head, mastered by the haunting fears of treachery, and wrote to Hume that his horrible designs were at last found out. For once in his life Hume lost his temper, and discretion departed from him. He determined to punish Rousseau’s ingratitude and put himself right in the eyes of the world. But before taking this step he wrote to consult his friends in Paris, and Smith sent the following reply:— “Paris, _6th July 1766_. “My dear Friend,—I am thoroughly convinced that Rousseau is as great a rascal as you and as every man here believes him to be. Yet let me beg of you not to think of publishing anything to the world upon the very great impertinence which he has been guilty of to you. By refusing the pension which you had the goodness to solicit for him with his own consent, he may have thrown, by the baseness of his proceedings, a little ridicule upon you in the eyes of the court and the ministry. Stand this ridicule; expose his brutal letter, but without giving it out of your own hand, so that it may never be printed; and, if you can, laugh at yourself; and I shall pawn my life that before three weeks are at an end this little affair which at present gives you so much uneasiness shall be understood to do you as much honour as anything that has ever happened to you. By endeavouring to unmask before the public this hypocritical pedant, you run the risk of disturbing the tranquillity of your whole life. By letting him alone he cannot give you a fortnight’s uneasiness. To write against him is, you may depend upon it, the very thing he wishes you to do. He is in danger of falling into obscurity in England, and he hopes to make himself considerable by provoking an illustrious adversary. He will have a great party, the Church, the Whigs, the Jacobites, the whole wise English nation, who will love to mortify a Scotchman, and to applaud a man who has refused a pension from the King.