The general charge against Hume was that he was a member of an accursed triumvirate; Voltaire and D’Alembert were the other partners; and their object was to blacken the character of Rousseau and render his life miserable.  The particular acts on which this belief was established were the following:—­

(1) While Rousseau was in Paris, there appeared a letter nominally addressed to him by the King of Prussia, and written in an ironical strain, which persuaded Jean Jacques himself that it was the work of Voltaire.[360] Then he suspected D’Alembert.  It was really the composition of Horace Walpole, who was then in Paris.  Now Hume was the friend of Walpole, and had given Rousseau a card of introduction to him for the purpose of entrusting Walpole with the carriage of some papers.  Although the false letter produced the liveliest amusement at Rousseau’s cost, first in Paris and then in London, Hume, while feigning to be his warm friend and presenting him to the English public, never took any pains to tell the world that the piece was a forgery, nor did he break with its wicked author.[361] (2) When Rousseau assured Hume that D’Alembert was a cunning and dishonourable man, Hume denied it with an amazing heat, although he well knew the latter to be Rousseau’s enemy.[362] (3) Hume lived in London with the son of Tronchin, the Genevese surgeon, and the most mortal of all the foes of Jean Jacques.[363] (4) When Rousseau first came to London, his reception was a distinguished triumph for the victim of persecution from so many governments.  England was proud of being his place of refuge, and justly vaunted the freedom of her laws and administration.  Suddenly and for no assignable cause the public tone changed, the newspapers either fell silent or else spoke unfavourably, and Rousseau was thought of no more.  This must have been due to Hume, who had much influence among people of credit, and who went about boasting of the protection which he had procured for Jean Jacques in Paris.[364] (5) Hume resorted to various small artifices for preventing Rousseau from making friends, for procuring opportunities of opening Rousseau’s letters, and the like.[365] (6) A violent satirical letter against Rousseau appeared in the English newspapers, with allusions which could only have been supplied by Hume. (7) On the first night after their departure from Paris, Rousseau, who occupied the same room with Hume, heard him call out several times in the middle of the night in the course of his dreams, Je tiens Jean Jacques Rousseau, with extreme vehemence—­which words, in spite of the horribly sardonic tone of the dreamer, he interpreted favourably at the time, but which later event proved to have been full of malign significance.[366] (8) Rousseau constantly found Hume eyeing him with a glance of sinister and diabolic import that filled him with an astonishing disquietude, though he did his best to combat it.  On one of these occasions he was seized with remorse, fell upon Hume’s