In his History of England, David Hume devotes a short eulogistic paragraph to Isaac Newton:

Though the two men never met, the Newton that Hume portrays resembles no one so much as Hume himself, or at least the way he would later represent himself in his deathbed autobiography, My Own Life. In it, Hume pictures himself as a man who, like Newton, refuses to bow to “common apprehensions” in pursuing his work, waiting patiently for his fame to catch up with his merit. Hume even describes himself using the same metaphor of the delayed, feverish reputation he had used to portray Newton: “I see many symptoms of my literary reputation's breaking out at last with additional lustre.” Despite the correspondence in Hume's descriptions, however, neither their professional lives nor the reception histories of their books followed such parallel tracks. Hume ultimately became known for pandering to popular taste, deliberately forsaking studies too difficult for a general reader to understand.