Under the influences of Mme. de Boufflers he tried to make a home in England for that strange creature, Rousseau, who had become an exile, and who brought with him--to the torment of Hume--all his eccentricities, his peevishness, his inhuman vanities, his abnormal sensitiveness, his wild jealousies, and his exaltations of genius. These things work a rupture between the two in the end--as they should and ought to do,--and the next good sight we have of the Scotch philosopher is in a new home of his own (1772), which he has built in the new part of Edinboro'. Twenty odd years before he had lived in the old city on an income of £50 a year; and now he lives in the new with an income of £1,000 a year. In {155} the old times he had hardly secured place as Custodian of the mouldy Library of the Advocates; now he is the marked potentate in the literary world of Scotland. Stanch Presbyterians do indeed look at him askance, and shake their heads at his uncanny beliefs, or rather lack of beliefs. Old nurses put hobgoblin wings upon him to frighten good children; but he has stanch, loving friends among the best and the clearest sighted. Dr. Blair is his friend; excellent Dr. Robertson is his friend; his good nature, his kindness of heart, his rectitude of life, his intellectual charities, won even those who shuddered at his disbeliefs; that sceptical miasma--born in his blood--and harmful to many (as it was to himself), seemed to lose its malarious taint in the large, free, intellectual atmosphere in which the philosopher lived. Honest doubts were then, and always will be, better than dishonest beliefs; just as honest beliefs are a thousand fold better than dishonest doubts. [Sidenote: Death of Hume.] It was in our year of 1776--when his reputation was brightening and widening month by month, that David Hume, the author of the first scholarly History of England, died, and was buried {156} on a shoulder of the Calton Hill, from which one may look eastward across the valley (where lies Holyrood Palace) to the Salisbury Crags on the left and to the Castle Rock on the right.