How unimportant these things seem to you now? I hear much, from time to time, of your continuing, nay, increasing celebrity and fame. You are just the high mode, they tell us--the very delice of all the good company at Paris.
In a letter to Millar, chiefly in reference to some English law books, which Hume had engaged to obtain for a French lawyer, he recurs to the Memoirs of King James. He seems to have indolently adopted the notion that there were few chances of his having an opportunity of making additions to his History of the Stuarts. He did live, however, to see more than one new edition of it: but the references in them to the treasure he had discovered at Paris, are extremely meagre. Another letter immediately follows, in which we find that his anticipations of new editions are already outrun by the demands: and we find in his, as in many other cases, where permanent fame has been reached, that the excitement of expectant authorship has declined long before its visions are realized; and that their fulfilment comes at last on minds sobered down to indifference.
"I have lived such a life of dissipation as not to be able to think of any serious occupation. But I begin to tire of that course of life. I have, however, run over King James's Memoirs, and have picked up some curious passages, which it is needless to speak of till we have occasion for a new edition, which I suppose is very distant."
"DEAR SIR,--All the discoveries I made in King James's Memoirs, make against himself and his brother; and he is surely a good enough witness on that side: but I believe him also a man of veracity, and I should have put trust in any matter of fact that he told from his own knowledge. But this it is needless for us to talk any more about; since, I suppose, you have got copies enough of my History, already printed, to last for your lifetime and mine. I shall certainly never think of adding another line to it. I am too much your friend to think of it. . . . I beg my sincere compliments to Mrs. Millar. I saw a few days ago Mrs. Mallet, who seems to be going upon a strange project, of living alone, in a hermitage, in the midst of the forest of Fontainbleau. I pass my time very agreeably here; though somewhat too much dissipated for one of my years and humour."[201:1]