The century would see the political importance of the monarchy decline
through the dullness of Anne Stewart while the astuteness of Robert
Walpole would transfer the real power to the Parliament in London.
Britain solved the knotty problem of the royal succession by importing a
German-speaking dynasty from Hanover, and by the turn of the nine-
teenth century the overall power of the Parliament had asserted itself.
This rational man, David Hume, would be at the heart of the Enlight-
enment - defined as that period when reason gained the ascendancy over
faith - in Edinburgh as much as in Europe where conventional faith-based
thought had already been revolutionised by the writings of Pierre Bayle in
the seventeenth century. The American historian Barbara Tuchman said,
'Not God, but gravity, brought the apple down on Newton's head'.3 The
Enlightenment took time to shine its lamp in England and Scotland.
Hume was, in turn, law student, philosopher, merchant's clerk, tutor,
judge-advocate to a general, librarian, historian (his own preferred
description), essayist, diplomat and senior civil servant. He was also a
reputed atheist, bon viveur, wit, key figure in the Scottish Enlightenment
and darling of the Paris salons. No eighteenth-century novelist dared to
give his hero a life of such bewildering variety.
In France he was le bon David, in Scotland James Boswell called him
'the Great Infidel'. The English thought him dangerously Scottish and the
Scots found him bafflingly unorthodox. In a time of hypocritical morality
his honesty appalled the establishment, and his writing was without fear or
favour. At his funeral one man cried out, 'Ye ken he was an atheist!' To
which another shouted, 'Aye, but he was honest!'
It was a spontaneous epitaph of which any man would be proud.
A NOTE ON CURRENCY VALUES. In 1750 one English pound had a buying
power in contemporary terms of 481.05. Since most of Hume's transac-
tions were in English pounds, readers wishing to convert the monetary
amounts to contemporary values should multiply by eighty. I have
modernised eighteenth-century punctuation and spelling where I felt
clarity would be improved. I have also removed the capitalisation of
nouns. Square brackets in the text mark my own interpolations. Any errors
in translation from French are entirely mine.

-xiv-