You will learn further from that precious bit of autobiography--which he calls with a naïve directness, "My Own Life"--that he was younger son of a good family; that he came to fairish education thereabout, and in Edinboro'; that his family would have pushed him to the study of law; but he--loving philosophy and literature better, and in search of some method of increasing his means for their pursuit--wandered southward to study business in the city of Bristol. This was a place of much greater commercial importance, {148} relatively, then than now: but Bristol merchandizing presently disgusts him; and husbanding carefully his small moneys, he goes across the Channel--to study philosophy, while practising the economies of French provincial life in a small town of central France. A few years thereafter he prints his first book in London on _Human Nature_; and he says it fell "dead-born" from the press; but he is still sanguine and cheery; writes other essays after his return from France--hovering between Edinboro' and his old Berwickshire home; studying Greek the while, and for a year serving, as secretary, the crazy Marquis of Annandale. Shortly thereafter (1746) began his official connection with the General St. Clair, involving a new and pleasanter experience of European life. On his return, after three years, he goes to cover again in his old Berwickshire home, where he elaborates the _Political Discourses_--setting forth those broad views of trade and commerce, which came to larger illustration later, under the pen of his good friend Adam Smith.[2] {149} [Sidenote: Hume's England.] In 1751 he removed from country to town--the true scene he says "for a man of letters," and established himself in a small flat of one of those lofty houses which still look down over the New City and the valley gardens, and lived there comfortably--with his sister for help mate--on some £50 a year. He tried vainly for a professorship in one of the Scottish universities, but was counted too unsafe a man. As Custodian of the Advocates' Library of Edinboro', a place which he secured shortly after--largely through the influence of lady friends--he came to that familiar fellowship with books which prompted him to the making of his History of England. He does not begin at the beginning: he tells of the Stuarts first; then goes back to the Tudors; and then back of these to the dull (dull to him and dull to us) Anglo-saxon start point: Stubbs and Freeman had not in that {150} day made their explorative forays and set up their scaffoldings. Hume's ambition was high and sensitive: he was intensely disappointed with the reception of the earlier volumes of his history. "I was discouraged," he says, "and had not the war been at that time breaking out between France and England, I had certainly retired to some provincial town of the former kingdom, have changed my name, and never more have returned to my native country."