Having thus, at the age of twenty-seven, embarked and made an inauspicious voyage on the uncertain sea of literature, Hume, without even waiting to know the fate of his work――for which a publisher had given the sum of fifty pounds――turned his face northward; and, perhaps, with some slight regret that he had relinquished the profession of the law, and deserted the merchant’s desk, sought the agreeable seclusion of his family’s fair domain, which he found his brother laudably occupied in improving and enhancing in value. Among its old trees, pleasantly shading the gentle acclivity whence burst the nine fountains which gave a name to the place, and with which the argent lion on his ancestral shield was charged, Hume experienced so much satisfactory enjoyment in “retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books,” that, though the ideas and tastes of his relatives could not have harmonized very readily or easily with his own, he would, in all probability, had other matters been equal, have chosen to pass his life there. But the ambition for literary fame continued strongly to animate and influence him; and his time was chiefly spent in grave reading, deep meditation, in restoring his knowledge of the Greek language, and in corresponding, among others, with his friend Henry Home, afterward celebrated as Lord Kames. Such was his position, when the last Marquis of Annandale, a Scottish nobleman, whose eccentricity took the form of lunacy, having read some of the hapless essays, was so charmed with something he saw in them, that he conceived a passionate wish to obtain the services of the learned author as his tutor. Hume was induced, by the temptation of an ample salary, to accept the office of companion to this weak-minded man, and had his temper severely tested in consequence. After holding the luckless and invidious post for a year, during which the marquis seems to have written a novel, relating to some events and love affairs in his own life, Hume’s patience and placidity gave way, and, throwing up the situation, he became candidate for the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh, which, although powerfully supported, he was unable to obtain, on account of his well-known sentiments on religious subjects.