I should have made a very bad use of my abode in Paris if I could not get the better of a mere provincial like him.

All my friends encourage me in this ambition; as thinking it will redound very much to my honour." In 1770, Hume built himself a house in the new town of Edinburgh, which was then springing up.

It was the first house in the street, and a frolicsome young lady chalked upon the wall "St.David's Street." Hume's servant complained to her master, who replied, "Never mind, lassie, many a better man has been made a saint of before," and the street retains its title to this day.
In the following six years, the house in St.David's Street was the centre of the accomplished and refined society which then distinguished Edinburgh.

Adam Smith, Blair, and Ferguson were within easy reach; and what remains of Hume's correspondence with Sir Gilbert Elliot, Colonel Edmonstone, and Mrs.Cockburn gives pleasant glimpses of his social surroundings, and enables us to understand his contentment with his absence from the more perturbed, if more brilliant, worlds of Paris and London.
Towards London, Londoners, and indeed Englishmen in general, Hume entertained a dislike, mingled with contempt, which was as nearly rancorous as any emotion of his could be.

During his residence in Paris, in 1764 and 1765, he writes to Blair:-- "The taste for literature is neither decayed nor depraved here, as with the barbarians who inhabit the banks of the Thames." And he speaks of the "general regard paid to genius and learning" in France as one of the points in which it most differs from England.