of.” “Oh,” replied the lady, “bring him here as much as you please, for he is the most innocent, agreeable, facetious man I ever met with.” His scepticism was subject for his friends’ wit and his own. He heard Carlyle preach in Athelstaneford Church. “I did not think that such heathen morality would have passed in East Lothian.” One day when he sat in the Poker Club it was mentioned that a clerk of Sir William Forbes, the banker, had bolted with £900. When he was taken, there was found in one pocket Hume’s _Treatise on Human Nature_ and in the other Boston’s _Fourfold State of Man_, this latter being a work of evangelical theology. His moderate friends presently suggested that no man’s morality could hold out against the combination. Dr. Jardine of the Tron Kirk vigorously argued with him on various points of theology, suggested by Hume’s _Natural History of Religion_. His friend, like most folk in Edinburgh, lived in a flat off a steep turnpike stair, down which Hume fell one night in the darkness. Jardine got a candle and helped the panting philosopher to his feet. Your old Edinburgh citizen never could resist the chance of a cutting remark. The divine was no exception. “Davy, I have often tell’t ye that ‘natural licht’ is no’ sufficient.” Like Socrates, he hid his wit under an appearance of simplicity. His own mother’s opinion of him was: “Davy’s a fine, good-natured crater, but uncommon wake-minded.” He had his weaknesses, undoubtedly. Lord Saltoun said to him, referring to his credulity, “David, man, you’ll believe onything except the Bible,” but like other Scotsmen of his time he did not believe overmuch in Shakespeare. In 1757 he thus addresses the author of _Douglas_: “You possess the true theatrical genius of Shakespeare and Otway, refined from the barbarisms of the one, and the licentiousness of the other.” Put beside this Burns’s famous and fatuous line: “Here Douglas forms wild Shakespeare into plan,” and what can you do but shudder? When young, he had paid his court to a lady of fashion, and had met with scant courtesy. He was told afterwards that she had changed her mind. “So have I,” said the philosopher. On another occasion he was more gallant. Crossing the Firth in a gale he said to Lady Wallace, who was in the boat, that they would soon be food for the fishes. “Will they eat you or me?” said the lady. “Ah,” was the answer, “those that are gluttons will undoubtedly fall foul of me, but the epicure will attack your ladyship.” David, like the fishes he described, was a bit of an epicure of the simplest kind. He would sup with his moderate friends in Johnny Dowie’s tavern in Libberton’s Wynd. On the table lay his huge door-key, wherewith his servant, Peggy, had been careful to provide him that she might not have to rise to let him in. After all, the friends did not sit very late, and the supper was some simple Scots dish—haddock, or tripe, or fluke, or pies, or it might be