Hume had now attained the age of forty, and, though there certainly exists evidence which makes one suspect that he had not always proved that rare impenetrability to female blandishments for which his biographers have given him credit, there was, at this time of life, small chance of his being betrayed into a matrimonial alliance. His brother, therefore, aroused himself to the duty of transmitting the name, and continuing the succession, and, in 1751, wedded the daughter of a neighboring family. This country gentleman was a person of retired habits; he had a strong aversion to every thing savoring, or even having the appearance, of vanity; and he was so extremely prudent in his actions, that, with the exception of his marriage, he never took any step without having previously calculated the consequences to his satisfaction. When the latter momentous event occurred, the philosopher felt a natural longing to have a tenement of his own. His mother, whom he describes as a woman of singular merit, and whom he had in her lifetime treated with much filial kindness and affection, had been in her grave for years; and he proposed “to take up house in Berwickshire” with his sister; but duly weighing and deliberately considering the matter, he came to the conclusion that a town was “the true scene for a man of letters;” and, removing to Edinburgh, he exercised so much frugality in disposing of his slender income that he was enabled to live in comfort and contentment. Yet he was not, by any means, parsimonious, and ever was ready, on fitting occasions, to prove his generosity by charitable and beneficent actions. The year 1752 was an important one in Hume’s life. He was then appointed Librarian to the Faculty of Advocates, after a severe and spirited contest, in which, besides the junior members of the bar, his chief allies were the ladies of “modern Athens,” who made strenuous efforts and exerted their utmost fascinations in his behalf. When the triumph was achieved he found himself in a most advantageous position in regard to an excellent and well-stocked library, which fortunately suggested to his brain the scheme of furnishing the world with a classical history of England, then a serious desideratum in national literature. “Being frightened,” he states in his autobiography, “with the notion of continuing a narrative through a period of seventeen hundred years, I commenced with the House of Stuart, an epoch where I thought the misrepresentation of faction began chiefly to take place.”