Page:Life of William Shelburne (vol 1).djvu/246

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220
WILLIAM, EARL OF SHELBURNE
CH. VI

tions of the society he had met there in the following letter:

December 12th, 1761.

My Lord,—An accident, a little unexpected has hastened my journey to Scotland a little sooner than I intended. I was offered a chaise that sets out to-morrow morning, where I could sit alone and loiter and read and muse for the length of four hundred miles. Your Lordship may judge, by this specimen of my character, how unfit I am to mingle in such an active and sprightly society as that of which your Lordship invited me to partake, and that in reality a book and a fireside, are the only scenes for which I am now qualified. But I should be unfit to live among human creatures could I ever forget the obligations which I owe to your Lordship's goodness, or could ever lose the firm resolution of expressing my sense of them on all occasions. I beg your Lordship to believe that, though age and philosophy have mortified all ambition in me, yet there are other sentiments which I find more inherent to me, which I shall always cherish, and which no time can efface. And when I shall see your Lordship making a figure in the active scenes of life, I shall always consider your progress with a peculiar pleasure, though perhaps accompanied with the regret that I partake of it at so great a distance. I remember to have seen a picture in your Lordship's house of a Hottentot who fled from a cultivated life to his companions in the woods and left behind him all his fine accoutrements and attire. I compare not my case to his; for I return to very sociable, civilized people.[1] I only mean to express the force of habit which renders a man accustomed to retreat and study unfit for the commerce of the great world, and makes it a necessary piece of wisdom for him to shun it after age has rendered that habit entirely inveterate. This is the only excuse I can give to your Lordship for being so much wanting to my

  1. Hume was then on his way to Scotland. In 1763 Lord Hertford, Ambassador to the Court of France, appointed him to be his secretary.