From one cause or another the valley is deeper than of yore, and the simple round tower that marks Hume’s grave in the Calton burying-ground crowns a half-natural, half-artificial precipice. It is seen with effect from various points: thus you cannot miss it as you cross the North Bridge. Some memory of this great thinker still projects itself into the trivial events of the modern Edinburgh day. Of Hume’s friend and companion, Adam Smith, there are various anecdotes, more or less pointed, bearing on his oblivious or maybe contemptuous indifference to the ordinary things of life. The best and best known tells how, as he went with shuffling gait and vacant look, a Musselburgh fishwife stared at him in amazement. “Hech, and he is weel put on tae.” It seemed to her a pity that so well-dressed a simpleton was not better looked after. No amount of learning helps you in a crowded street. The wisdom of the ancients reports that Thales, wrapt in contemplation of the stars, walked into a well and thus ended. Adam Smith’s grave is in a dark corner of the Canongate Churchyard; it is by no means so prominent as Hume’s, nay, it takes some searching to discover. When I saw it last I found it neglected and unvisited alike by economic friends and foes. Among Hume’s intimate cronies was Dr. Carlyle of Inveresk, whose _Autobiography_ preserves for us the best record of the men of his time. “The grandest demigod I ever saw,” says Sir Walter Scott, “commonly called Jupiter Carlyle, from having sat more than once for the King of gods and men to Gavin Hamilton, and a shrewd, clever old carle he was, no doubt, but no more a poet than his precentor.” This last is apropos of some rhyming of Carlyle’s as bad as rhymes can possibly be. In 1758 Carlyle and Principal Robertson and John Home were together in London; they went down to Portsmouth and aboard the _Ramilies_, the warship in the harbour, where was Lieut. Nelson, a cousin of Robertson’s. The honest sailor expressed his astonishment in deliciously comical terms: “God preserve us! what has brought the Presbytery of Edinburgh here? for damme me if there is not Willy Robertson, Sandie Carlyle, and John Home come on board.” He soon had them down in the cabin, however, and treated them to white wine and salt beef. A jolly meal, you believe, for divines or sceptics, philosophers or men of letters or business, those old Edinburgh folk had a common and keen enjoyment of life. Certainly Carlyle had. Dr. Lindsay Alexander of Augustine Church, Edinburgh, remembered as a child hearing one of the servants say of this divine, “There he gaed, dacent man, as steady as a wa’ after his ain share o’ five bottles o’ port.” Home by this time was no longer a minister of the Church. He had thrown up his living in the previous year on account of the famous row about the once famous tragedy of _Douglas_. He still had a hankering after the General Assembly, where, if he could no longer sit