Excerpt from Letters of David Hume and Extracts From Letters Referring to Him Of the various Letters contained in this volume, the originals are supposed to have been deposited, about eighty years ago, in the hands of a legal gentleman in Edinburgh, as documents for a law-suit, to which the latter portion of them refers. Since his death, they have, we believe, passed through several hands without having attracted any particular attention, or, perhaps, without having ever been read. They ultimately came into the possession of a gentleman who appreciated their value, and who, several years ago, did me the honour of presenting them unconditionally to me. Since that time, they have been perused by many literary friends, to whom they were communicated; and they all, without a single exception, regarded this correspondence as calculated not merely to throw light on Mr Hume's character, but to illustrate a period of his history, which had they been destroyed, must have remained very obscure. In his well-known autobiography, the only mention of his residence with the Marquis of Annandale, - to which part of his life these Letters belong, - is sufficiently meagre, and contains no allusion to the interesting circumstances, which, while they could not but be painful to his feelings, elicited, in an eminent degree, the peculiarities of his character. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.