When the Norman Conquest took place, a Northumbrian prince――whose grandmother was daughter of an English king, and whose brother became, by marriage with the heiress of the Nevilles, progenitor of those barons slain on the field of Barnet――was driven to seek refuge on the north side of the Tweed, where he founded that powerful feudal connection known as the house of Dunbar, which fell in the fifteenth century. One of its branches, and the inheritor of much of its power, was the baronial family of Home, whose chiefs bestowed such lands as came into their possession on their younger sons. One of these cadets――the historian’s ancestor――was thus gifted with Tyninghame, a fertile estate in Lothian; but being, unlike his remote descendant, an irreclaimable spendthrift, he totally dissipated this paternal grant. It happened, however, that his son, a youth of promise, was received into favor by the head of the clan, and planted at the Ninewells, on the pleasant banks of the Whitadder, where his successors, whose names no minstrel has sung, vegetated for three hundred years. In fact, though residing close to the Border, they do not appear to have fought in the wars which desolated the vicinity, nor even to have speculated in the precarious trade of cattle-lifting. They seem neither to have been puissant knights nor “rank reivers;” nor were they in request when a charter was to be attested, or an eldest son served heir to his father. But they paid a species of “black mail” to the English captain of Berwick, received protection, lived in peace, speared salmon, and cultivated their fruitful lands. In the reign of Queen Anne, one of these lairds, whose sire’s heart’s blood seems to have stained the blade of an exasperated sheriff, went in youth to the Scottish capital, and was in due time called to the bar; but without pursuing the legal profession further. He was considered a man of attainments, and took to wife, in 1708, the daughter of Sir David Falconer, Lord President of the College of Justice. By this lady he had two sons and a daughter, of whom David Hume was born, at Edinburgh, on the 26th of April, 1711.