About the beginning of March, 1734, Hume started for Bristol. He visited London in his way, and then traveled onward. He had obtained introductions to several leading merchants in the place; and on reaching his destination established himself in the counting-house of one of them, in the hope of forgetting the past, preparing for the future, and enriching himself by commerce. But the petty cares, the perpetual bustle, and the perennial annoyances of such a career, were found, as might have been anticipated, utterly intolerable to a person to whom legal studies had appeared irksome and unattractive; and, after a few months’ trial, he relinquished his new situation, with all its coarse, uncongenial duties, and those prospects of remuneration which are so seldom realized. Hume had already, according to his own statement, collected materials for many volumes. He, therefore, passed over to France, with the view of prosecuting his studies in some rural retreat. No doubt he could have done so at the time-honored mansion of his fathers, but circumstances had occurred since he left which rendered it impossible to return there with any feeling of comfort; so he made a short stay in Paris, and then repaired to Rheims, in the north of France, where he spent some months in literary retirement. “I there,” he writes, “laid that plan of life which I have steadily and successfully pursued. I resolved to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvement of my talents in literature.” Having formed this wise and prudent determination, he removed to La Flèche, in Anjou, where he prepared his “Treatise on Human Nature;” and then he returned to London, to superintend the publication, and endure the suspense. Being issued in 1738, the work, to use his own expression, fell still-born from the press; though when subsequently published in separate essays, it was a little more successful.