the desirableness of the end. It is necessary, also, along with the account of Hume's efforts to gain a humble livelihood, to keep in mind the state of society in Scotland at that time. The union with England had introduced new habits of living, which made the means of the smaller aristocracy insufficient for the support of their younger children. On the other hand, England was jealous of Scottish rivalry in foreign trade: neither agriculture nor manufactures had made any considerable progress in Scotland; while Indian enterprise was in its infancy, and Scottish adventurers in the East had not yet found a Pactolus in the Ganges. At that period the gentleman-merchant, manufacturer, or money dealer; the civil engineer, architect, editor, or artist, were nearly unknown in Scotland. The only form in which a man poor and well born could retain the rank of a gentleman, if he did not follow one of the learned professions, was by obtaining a commission in the army, or a government civil appointment.[196:1] Here ended the channels to subsistence along with gentility, and he who had none of these paths open to him, and had resolved to make an independent livelihood by his own talents or labour, had at once, as the German nobles frequently do in the present day, to abandon his rank, and become a shopkeeper or small farmer, probably with the intention of returning to the bosom of his former social circle when he had realized an independence, but more commonly ending his days with the consciousness that he was, in the words of Henry Hunt, "the first of a race of gentlemen who had become a tradesman." Any lawyer who pays attention to the statistics of the Scottish decisions in mercantile cases, during the earlier part of the eighteenth century, will have noticed how frequently it occurs that the younger sons of some good family are mentioned as fulfilling the humblest duties of village tradesmen.[197:1] The practice is now comparatively unknown. The well educated gentleman's son, if he be brought up to commerce, connects himself with those more liberal departments of it, in which he may reap the advantage of his education and training. To the practice which distinguished the period of depression above alluded to, aided perhaps by the spirit of clanship, we may owe the existence of so many aristocratic names among the humbler tradesmen in Scotland. In England the nomenclature of a city directory will as surely indicate the court and the tradesmen end of the town, as the Norman name used to indicate nobility and the Saxon vassalage. We do not find Edward Plantagenet keeping an oyster shop, or Henry Seymour cobbling shoes; but it would not be difficult to exemplify these humble occupations, in the regal names of a Robert Bruce or a James Stuart. In his essay on "The Parties of Great Britain," published in 1741, Hume alludes to the absence of a middle class in Scotland, where he says there are only "two ranks of