Into Hume’s pleasant house Johnson unhappily never entered.[378] He even thought that his friend Dr. Adams, the Master of Pembroke College, had done wrong when he had met by invitation “that infidel writer” at dinner, and “had treated him with smooth civility.”[379] Yet a man who could yield to the temptation of the talk of Jack Wilkes had no right to stand aloof from David Hume. We should like to know what he would have thought of that philosopher’s _soupe à la reine_ made from a receipt which he had copied in his own neat hand, or of his “beef and cabbage (a charming dish) and old mutton and old claret, in which,” he boasted, “no man excelled him.” Perhaps, however, if Johnson could have been persuaded to taste the claret, old as it was, he would have shaken his head over it and called it “poor stuff.”[380] The sheep-head broth he would certainly have refused, though one Mr. Keith did speak of it for eight days after,[381] and the Duke de Nivernois would have bound himself apprentice to Hume’s lass to learn it.[382] “The stye of that fattest of Epicurus’s hogs” he failed to visit. “You tell me,” wrote the great Gibbon to a friend who was at Edinburgh just at the time of Johnson’s arrival, “you tell me of a long list of Dukes, Lords, and Chieftains of renown to whom you are introduced; were I with you I should prefer one _David_ to them all.”[383] Boswell could easily have brought the two men together, intimate as he was with both. Early in his life he was able to boast that one of them had visited him in the forenoon and the other in the afternoon of the same day.[384] Hume’s conversation perhaps was not after the fashion which Johnson liked. It certainly would not have come recommended to him by his broad Scotch accent. Nevertheless there was that about it which endeared it to his friends. For innocent mirth and agreeable raillery he was thought to be unmatched.[385] Adam Smith has celebrated his constant pleasantry. In his wit there was not the slightest tincture of malignity.[386] But Johnson would have nothing to do with him.[387] In Boswell’s house in James’s Court, that Sunday he spent there in Dr. Robertson’s company, he said “something much too rough both as to Mr. Hume’s head and heart,” which Boswell thought well to suppress. In the quiet stillness of that summer sabbath day in Edinburgh, the strong loud voice might almost have been carried across the narrow valley to St. Andrew’s Square, and startled the philosopher in his retirement.