In 1761, commenced Hume's acquaintance with Madame de Boufflers. It afterwards ripened into a friendship, of which we cannot fully estimate the nature, without looking not only at the character and position of the parties, but at some conventional notions of morality, to which Hume had been, previously, a stranger. Hyppolyte de Saujon, Comtesse de Boufflers-Rouvel, is not to be confounded with her contemporary the Marquise de Boufflers-Rémencourt, mother of the witty Chevalier de Boufflers. The prominent difference between them is but too startlingly characteristic of the moral atmosphere in which they both lived--that the former was mistress of the Prince of Conti, while the latter is supposed to have held the same relation to Prince Stanislaus Augustus of Poland, of whose court she was the great ornament and attraction. A friendship between a respectable Scotsman of letters and a person in Madame de Boufflers' position, is apt to excite a smile or a frown, according to the habits or temper of the reader. Hume himself was not likely to take the most austere view of the matter; and must have felt, at any rate, that the scandal and even the blame of such connexions must be greatly affected by the countenance they receive from the society to which the parties belong. On the vileness of this code of organized immorality, it would be superfluous, at this hour, to enlarge; but there is a great difference between those who act up to the standard of a low social system and those who do the same acts in breach of a higher code. A Mahomedan who keeps a harem in Constantinople is inferior in his tone of morality to an English gentleman, of good domestic conduct; but he is infinitely superior to an Englishman with a harem in Piccadilly.