These “friends” to whom Hume refers, were at that time, as they had been throughout his life, the best of good company, that is, the kind for whom a good dinner would have been nothing had not good conversation been its sauce, but for whom the sauce was none the worse for dressing out a good dinner. In such good company, it is not a great matter that Hume should have been free of pleasant sallies after the manner of the letter I have quoted. It throws a higher light on his character when we find him preparing to receive his last, the unbidden guest in the same cheerful humor. “I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution,” he writes at the conclusion of his little sketch “My own Life.” “I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange, have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment’s abatement of spirits; insomuch that were I to name the period of my life which I should most choose to pass over again, I might be tempted to point to this latter period. I possess the same ardor as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company. I consider, besides, that a man of sixty-five, by dying, cuts off only a few years of infirmities; and though I see many symptoms of my literary reputation’s breaking out at last with additional lustre, I knew that I could have but a few years to enjoy it. It is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present.” And there follows a characterization of himself that could indeed be hardly more detached were it written by a stranger. “I am,” he says, “or rather was (for that style I must now use in speaking of myself, which emboldens me the more to speak my sentiments); I was, I say, a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open social and cheerful humor, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions.... My company was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary: and as I took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women, I had no reason to be displeased with the reception I met with from them.... My friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct: not but that the zealots, we may well suppose, would have been glad to invent and propagate any story to my disadvantage, but they could never find any which they thought would wear the face of probability. I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.”