wounded by a musket-ball in the shoulder.' {20a}

The second-hand chatter of Hume, in his letter to Sir John Pringle
(February 13, 1773), is unworthy of serious attention.

Helvetius told Hume that his house at Paris had sheltered the Prince
in the years following his expulsion from France, in 1748. He called
Charles 'the most unworthy of mortals, insomuch that I have been
assured, when he went down to Nantz to embark on his expedition to
Scotland, he took fright and refused to go on board; and his
attendants, thinking the matter gone too far, and that they would be
affronted for his cowardice, carried him in the night time into the
ship, pieds et mains lies.'

The sceptical Hume accepts this absurd statement without even asking,
or at least without giving, the name of Helvetius's informant. The
adventurer who insisted on going forward when, at his first landing
in Scotland, even Sir Thomas Sheridan, with all the chiefs present,
advised retreat, cannot conceivably have been the poltroon of Hume's
myth. Even Hume's correspondent, Sir John Pringle, was manifestly
staggered by the anecdote, and tells Hume that another of his fables
is denied by the very witness to whom Hume appealed. {20b} Hume had
cited Lord Holdernesse for the story that Charles's presence in
London in 1753 (1750 seems to be meant) was known at the time to
George II. Lord Holdernesse declared that there was nothing in the
tale given by Hume on his authority! That Charles did not join the
rallied clans at Ruthven after Culloden was the result of various
misleading circumstances, not of cowardice. Even after 1746 he
constantly carried his life in his hand, not only in expeditions to
England (and probably to Scotland and Ireland), but in peril from the