This is certainly a remarkable letter to have been written by a youth little more than sixteen years old. If it had been written by one less distinguished by the originality of his mature intellect, it might be looked upon as one of those illustrations of the faculty of imitation, for which some young persons display peculiar powers; but its grave and high-toned philosophical feeling is evidently no echo of other people's words, but the deeply felt sentiments of the writer. In some measure, perhaps, he deceived himself in believing that he had attuned his mind to pastoral simplicity, and had weeded it of all ambitious longings. If he had a sympathy with Virgil, it was not, as he has represented, with the poet's ideas of life, but with his realizations of it; not with the quiet sphere of a retired and unnoticed existence, but with the lustre of a well-earned fame. Through the whole, indeed, of the memorials of Hume's early feelings, we find the traces of a bold and far-stretching literary ambition; and though he believed that he had seared his mind to ordinary human influences, it was because this one had become so engrossing as to overwhelm all others. "I was seized very early," he tells us, in his 'own life,' "with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life, and a great source of my enjoyments." Joined to this impulse, we find a practical philosophy partaking far more of the stoical than of that sceptical school with which his metaphysical writings have identified him; a morality of self-sacrifice and endurance, for the accomplishment of great ends. In whatever light we may view his speculative opinions, we gather from the habits of his life, and from the indications we possess of his passing thoughts, that he devotedly acted up to the principle, that his genius and power of application should be laid out with the greatest prospect of permanent advantage to mankind. He was an economist of all his talents from early youth: no memoir of a literary man presents a more cautious and vigilant husbandry of the mental powers and acquirements. There is no instance of a man of genius who has wasted less in idleness or in unavailing pursuits. Money was not his object, nor was temporary fame; though, of the means of independent livelihood, and a good repute among men, he never lost sight: but his ruling object of ambition, pursued in poverty and riches, in health and sickness, in laborious obscurity and amidst the blaze of fame, was to establish a permanent name, resting on the foundation of literary achievements, likely to live as long as human thought endured, and mental philosophy was studied.