Hume returned to this country in 1766, and was, the next year appointed Under-secretary of State for the department presided over by Marshal Conway, an office which he retained for more than twelve months. His annual income, the fruits of real industry, now amounted to a thousand pounds a year; and, taking a house in the new town of Edinburgh, he settled to spend his remaining days among his old and most attached friends. For some time his peaceful existence was uninterrupted, but in 1766 his health became so precarious that he was under the necessity of undertaking a journey to Bath, when he was attended by his friend and remote relative, John Home, the author of “Douglas,” with whom he had many a jocular debate about the correct orthography of their name, and the comparative merits of port and claret. The illustrious historian was fond of relieving his sinking spirits by a playful jest at the expense of his clansman’s warlike propensities, and did not omit so favorable an opportunity as that presented by the poet’s pistols being handed, with much ceremony, into the traveling-carriage: “You shall have your humor, John,” he said, “and shoot as many highwaymen as you like; for,” he added, with as much melancholy, perhaps, as a philosopher could well feel, “there’s too little life left in me to be worth fighting about.” It appears that the martial predilections alluded to were shortly afterward gratified by a commission in the “Buccleuch Fencibles,” though on this occasion they were not in requisition; unless, indeed, to inspire the young soul of Walter Scott, who was then exercising his precocious imagination at Bath, where he made the acquaintance of the bard, soldier, and divine, whose fame his pen, more than fifty years later, did something to extend and perpetuate. If the eye of the great historian, from which the world and all its vanities were fast vanishing, lighted on that lame boy, vigilantly guarded by a sarcastic and high-spirited female, how little could he have supposed that there was the being destined to invest with the charms of romance and the glow of chivalry that old royal cause, which he had employed all his wisdom and all his intellect to restore to public favor and render permanently attractive!