In this letter Hume had dropped a remark showing that he was still clinging to the idea which he had repeatedly mentioned to Smith of returning and making his home for the remainder of his days somewhere in France—­in Paris, or “Toulouse, or Montauban, or some provincial town in the South of France, where”—­to quote his words to Sir G. Elliot—­“I shall spend contentedly the rest of my life with more money, under a finer sky and in better company than I was born to enjoy.”  Of this idea Smith strongly disapproved.  He thought that Hume would find himself too old to transplant, and that he was being carried away by the great kindness and flatteries he had received in Paris into entertaining a plan which could never promote his happiness, because, in the first place, it would probably prove fatal to work, and in the next, it would certainly deprive him of the support of those old and rooted friendships which could not be replaced by the incense of an hour.  For his own part, and with a view to his own future, Smith was of an entirely opposite mind.  The contrast between the two friends in natural character stands out very strongly here.  Smith had enjoyed his stay in France almost as much as Hume, and had been welcomed everywhere by the best men and women in the country with high respect, but now that the term of his tutorship is approaching its end, he longs passionately for home, feels that he has had his fill of travel, and says if he once gets among his old friends again, he will never wander more.  This appears from a letter he wrote Millar, the bookseller, probably after his return from Compiegne, of which Millar sent the following extract to Hume:  “Though I am very happy here, I long passionately to rejoin my old friends, and if I had once got fairly to your side of the water, I think I should never cross it again.  Recommend the same sober way of thinking to Hume.  He is light-headed, tell him, when he talks of coming to spend the remainder of his days here or in France.  Remember me to him most affectionately."[186]

His return, for which he was then looking with so much desire, came sooner than he anticipated, and came, unfortunately, with a cloud.  His younger pupil, the Hon. Hew Campbell Scott, was assassinated in the streets of Paris, on the 18th of October 1766, in his nineteenth year;[187] and immediately thereafter they set out for London, bringing the remains of Mr. Scott along with them, and accompanied by Lord George Lennox, Hume’s successor as Secretary of Legation.  The London papers announce their arrival at Dover on the 1st of November.  The tutorship, which ended with this melancholy event, was always remembered with great satisfaction and gratitude by the surviving pupil.  “In October 1766,” writes the Duke of Buccleugh to Dugald Stewart, “we returned to London, after having spent near three years together without the slightest disagreement or coolness, and, on my part, with every advantage that could be expected from the society of such a man.  We continued to live in friendship till the hour of his death, and I shall always remain with the impression of having lost a friend whom I loved and respected, not only for his great talents, but for every private virtue.”