Rousseau never went so far north, never took Keith Hall for a hermitage, nor scandalised the Kirk Session. After his quarrel with Hume, the Earl did not write freely to him, saying that he wrote little to anyone. He thought, he tells another correspondent, of ‘turning bankrupt in letters.’ ‘My heart is not the dupe of these pretences,’ sighs Rousseau. He took money from the Earl, he took money at many hands. He sent a long deplorable lamentation to Marischal: the Earl has been deceived, a phantom has been exhibited to him as his fond J.-J. R. Probably there was no answer, but the Earl bequeathed to him his watch as a _souvenir_. ‘Jean Jacques est trop honête home pour ce monde, qui tâche a tourner en ridicule sa delicatesse,’ so the Earl had written from London to Hume in Paris. He appears, when in England, to have met Hume at Mitcham, and he was devoted to the stout, smiling sceptic, whom he called ‘_Defensor Fidei_.’ In 1764 the Earl left Neufchâtel for Potsdam, where Frederick built him a house. This he describes in a letter to Hume. The following note (1765) clearly refers to Hume’s report of Helvetius’s absurd anecdote, that Prince Charles showed the white feather on starting for Scotland, and had to be carried on board, tied hands and feet, by Sheridan, George Kelly, and others of the Seven Men of Moidart. Hume repeated this incredible nonsense in a letter to Sir John Pringle, who clearly distrusted the evidence.[31] This appears to be the ‘certain history’ which the Earl asks Hume to get from Helvetius, who had been ‘assured of the fact.’ By whom? To disseminate this fourth-hand scandal of his former master—scandal which, if true, he himself was in a better position to have heard than Helvetius—was perhaps the least worthy act of the Earl. The David Floyd of whom he writes occurs often in the Stuart Correspondence. He was of the old St. Germains set, being the son of that Captain Floyd, so much disliked by Lord Ailesbury, who came and went from England to James II., after 1688. In another letter the Earl advises Hume to consult Floyd on events ‘of which you took a confused note from me at Mitcham.’ Among these facts may be the story, given by Hume on the Earl’s authority, of Charles’s presence at the coronation of George III. No other evidence of this adventure exists. Here follows the letter:— ‘29 Aprile.