men," "gentlemen who have some fortune and education, and the meanest starving poor: without any considerable number of the middling rank of men, which abounds more in England, both in cities and in the country, than in any other quarter of the world."[198:1] The history of the miserable quarrels and intrigues connected with Hume's residence in the Annandale family, is a sad picture, not only of the position of the individual, but of his class,--the poor scholars, the servile drudges for bread. The modern literary labourer--or hack, as he is called by those who deem the word labourer too respectable to be employed on such an occasion--may look from the narrow bounds of his own independent home, with a feeling of sincere though not boastful superiority on David Hume, living in the splendid bondage of a peer's mansion. But in drawing the comparison on which the reflection rests, let him keep in view the state of literature and of society at that period, and ask where lay the hopes of the literary labourer? If he remained in the less conspicuous walks of learned industry, and became a divine or a teacher, there was before him the career of Parson Adams, taking his pot and pipe with the upper servants; or that of the threadbare tutor, subjected to the caprice and insolence of young men, who, if they do not happen to be endowed with a high tone of sentiment, must imbibe from all around them this feeling, that they are as far beyond the parallel of rank of their instructor, as the Brahmin is beyond that of the Pariah; or, thirdly, he might be the hired victim of a semi-maniac, whose few rays of remaining reason are but sufficient to indicate his own immeasurable superiority to the bought attendant of his humours. These were the resources of the man who distrusted the power of his own genius to soar into the higher flights of original literature; the man, who might perhaps be too conscientious, not to say also too timid, to throw the chance of his being able to meet his obligations to society and to perform his social duties, on the chance of his succeeding in the race for literary distinction. But suppose the race run and gained, and the laurels on the victor's brow,--for what, then, has all been risked, all encountered? True, Hume himself became one of the distinguished few who gained both fame and fortune; but in the ordinary case, if the former were achieved, the latter did not follow; and in seeking the types of literary distinction in his age, Fielding, Goldsmith, and Johnson are the names that rise before us. Was the garden in which these flowers bloomed so genial that we would have others transplanted thither?