I was born the 26th of April, 1711, old style, at Edinburgh. I was of
a good family, both by father and mother: my father's family is a
branch of the Earl of Home's, or Hume's; and my ancestors had been
proprietors of the estate which my brother possesses, for several
generations. My mother was daughter of Sir David Falconer, President
of the College of Justice: the title of Lord Halkerton came by
succession to her brother.

My family, however, was not rich; and being myself a younger brother,
my patrimony, according to the mode of my country, was of course very
slender. My father, who passed for a man of parts, died when I was an
infant, leaving me, with an elder brother and a sister, under the care
of our mother, a woman of singular merit, who, though young and
handsome, devoted herself entirely to the rearing and educating of her
children. I passed through the ordinary course of education with
success, and was seized very early with a passion for literature,
which has been the ruling passion of my life, and the great source of
my enjoyments. My studious disposition, my sobriety, and my industry,
gave my family a notion that the law was a proper profession for me;
but I found an unsurmountable aversion to every thing but the pursuits
of philosophy and general learning; and while they fancied I was
poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which
I was secretly devouring.

My very slender fortune, however, being unsuitable to this plan of
life, and my health being a little broken by my ardent application, I
was tempted, or rather forced, to make a very feeble trial for
entering into a more active scene of life. In 1734 I went to Bristol,
with some recommendations to several merchants; but in a few months