The following note, from the impetuous Alexander Murray, responds to the same strain:--
"MY DEAR HUME,--The great desire that several French gentlemen of my acquaintance have of being known to you, which happiness I have promised to procure them, makes me ardently beg the favour of you to do me the honour to dine with me any day next week (Monday excepted,) that you please to appoint. Your rencounters with the men, my dear friend, give me no sort of pain; but I freely own to you I am under some uneasiness how you will acquit yourself with the fair sex, whose impatience of knowing you is not to be expressed. The day you dine with me you will meet some folks who admire your productions as much as any of your own countrymen, and perhaps comprehend your sublime ideas as well as they do. I beg leave to assure you that no body loves and admires you more than your most sincere friend and humble servant."--(MS. R.S.E.)
[171:1] A translation was published in 1764, by M. A. Eidous; there was another in 1774, by Blavet.
[172:1] _Literary Gazette_, 1822, p. 648. Corrected from the original MS. R.S.E.
[172:2] The Poker Club, which had then existed for some time, and was continued for some years after Hume's death. Its name is supposed to have been bestowed on it, on account of its services in stirring the intellectual energies of the members.
[174:1] The name Adam used to be thus altered in the Scottish vernacular. The person here alluded to is evidently John Adam the architect, and the "Willie," his son William, who became Lord Chief Commissioner of the Jury Court in Scotland, and died in 1839.
[175:1] _Literary Gazette_, 1828, p. 683.
[176:2] Madame Belot, whose translation of the "History of the House of Tudor," was published in 1763, as "Histoire de la Maison de Tudor, &c. par Madam B * * *." She published a translation of the earlier period of the History, in 1765. Grimm charges Madame Belot with preposterous blunders as a translator; and gives, as an instance, her rendering Hume's allusion to the _Polish aristocracy_, by the words, _une aristocratie polie_. Of this lady, a curious periodical work, called "Mémoires Secrets, pour servir a l'Histoire de la République des lettres en France," says, of date 26th May, 1764, that, after having lived a life of wretched poverty, scantily supported by the produce of her translations from the English, she was then living with the President Mesnieres, whose taste is considered singular as "cette dame est peu jeune: elle est laide, seche et d'un esprit triste et mélancolique." Such were then the rewards of female authorship in France!