The whole aim of Johnson's False Alarm was ‘intended,’ as Boswell says, ‘to justify the conduct of Ministry and their majority in the House of Commons, for having virtually assumed it as an axiom, that the expulsion of a Member of Parliament was equivalent to exclusion.’ Boswell's Johnson , ii. 111. Wilkes for the fifth time was returned for Middlesex in the General Election of November 1774, ‘without a shadow of opposition from the Court. . . . The dispute concerning that single seat had produced to them more troubles, vexation, and disgraces, than the contest with the twelve united Colonies of America. It would have been an imprudence of the grossest kind to mix these disputes in the present crisis; and thus after near fourteen years’ struggle it was thought the best way to leave him master of the field.’ Ann. Reg. 1775, i. 39. Some opposition, it seems, had been intended, for Horace Walpole wrote on the day Parliament met—'st. Parliament's day,’ he styles it:—’Mr. Van is to move for the expulsion of Wilkes; which will distress, and may produce an odd scene.’ Letters , vi. 157. On May 3, 1782, on Wilkes's motion all the resolutions of the House respecting the Middlesex election were ordered, by a majority of 115 to 47, ‘to be expunged from the Journals of this House, as being subversive of the rights of the whole body of electors of this kingdom.’ Fox opposed the motion, as he held that ‘it was for the good of the people of England that the House should have a power of expelling any man, whom the representatives of the people of England thought unworthy to sit among them: this was a privilege too valuable to be given up.’ Parl. Hist. xxii. 1407.

Note 20. Burke in the Ann. Reg. for the following year (1772, i. 81) points out the causes by which the House of Commonshad lost much of its influence with the people and of the respect and reverence with which it was usually regarded. . . . Much of this may be attributed to the ill-judged contest with the printers [ ante , p. 190, n. 17] and the ridiculous issue of that affair. . . . Many of the Addresses which had been presented to the City Magistrates during their confinement in the Tower were direct libels upon that Assembly, and in other times would have been severely punished as such. . . . The printers, now that the impotency of the House was discovered, laughed at an authority which had been so much dreaded, before it was wantonly brought to a test that exposed its weakness. This discovery being made, the effect naturally followed; and in the succeeding session the votes of the House, a thing before unknown and contrary to its orders, were printed in the public newspapers without notice or inquiry; and thus the point in contest was apparently given up by the House.’

Note 21. Horace Walpole states that ‘Lord Mansfieldinnovations had given such an alarm that scarce a jury would find the rankest satire libellous.’ Memoirs of George III , iv. 168. Lord Mansfield, in trials for libel, maintainedthat a libel or not a libel was a matter of fact to be decided by the bench, and the question to be left to the jury was only the fact of printing and publishing.’ Adolphus's History of England , i. 441. By FoxLibel Bill, which was carried in 1792, it was declared that it was the function of the jury in cases of libel to be judges of law as well as of fact. Parl. Hist. xxix. 1537. See JuniusLetter to Lord Mansfield of Nov. 14, 1770, in which he says:—’When you invade the province of the jury in matter of libel, you in effect attack the liberty of the press, and with a single stroke wound two of your greatest enemies.’

Note 22. Strahan, in his next letter, dated July 23, was able to send more comforting news about the citizens. He wrote:—’You see our Lord Mayor, after advertising for a fortnight to invite the whole Livery and all the mob in London to attend him, hath presented another wise and modest Remonstrance. The papers give you a splendid account of the Cavalcade. But whatever they may tell you, I assure you from ocular demonstration, that it made a most pitiful and paltry figure. A number of people were indeed brought into the streets to gaze at him, and the few Aldermen and Common Council-men that accompanied him, but only about a dozen blackguards followed and holloed him, whose feeble applause was much more than overbalanced by the hisses of the honest spectators, who seemed to be inflamed with just indignation at seeing one of the best and most unexceptionable of Princes teased and abused by a little, pitiful, desperate and abandoned Junto, whom as individuals no reputable man would choose to associate with.’ M. S. R. S. E. In Strahanown paper, The London Chronicle , for July 11, 1771, it is stated that the cavalcade was composed of the Lord Mayor, five Aldermen, the two Sheriffs, with upwards of one hundred of the Common Council, in about fifty carriages, and thatit proceeded amidst the greatest acclamations of the people.’

Note 23. The King in his speech on opening Parliament on Nov. 15, 1763, announced his intention to apply to the public service the money arising from the sale of the prizes vested in the Crown, and of the lands in the islands in the West Indies that were ceded by the Treaty of Paris. Parl. Hist. xv. 1339. The total amount was upwards of £900,000. In addition, he gave up the hereditary revenues of the Crown, and accepted instead the fixed sum of £800,000 a year. According to Blackstone the public was a gainer by £100,000 a year. In the year 1777 £800,000 being found insufficient was increased to £900,000. Boswell's Johnson , ii. 353, n. 4. Burke, however, in his Present Discontents , says that in 1770 the whole revenue of the Crown wascertainly not much short of a million,’ not counting the sums that the King drew from his possessions in Germany. Payne Burke , i. 47. Nevertheless in 1769 application was made to Parliament for the payment of the debts of the Civil List, which amounted to over £500,000. Parl. Hist. xvi. 602. According to Burke, George II, though during the last fourteen years of his reign he had received less each year than his grandson, nevertheless at his death left £170,000 to his successor. Payne Burke , i. 68. With all the extravagance of George III's reign there was little splendour.I believe it will be found,’ said Burke in 1770, ‘that the picture of royal indigence which our Court has presented until this year has been truly humiliating. Nor has it been relieved from this unseemly distress but by means which have hazarded the affection of the people, and shaken their confidence in Parliament.’ Ib. p. 47.

Note 24. Johnson had said this same spring in his FalklandIslands :—’To fancy that our Government can be subverted by the rabble, whom its lenity has pampered into impudence, is to fear that a city may be drowned by the overflowings of its kennels.’ Johnson's Works , vi. 213.

It was the people above who were timid, and the people below who were insolent.

Note 26. Hume is hinting at the Earl of Bute, or the Dowager Princess of Wales, or both. Strahan replied to him on July 23:’It hath been long said, you know, that somebody behind the curtain has been a constant check upon the ostensible Ministers during this reign.’ M. S. R. S. E. On March 2, 1770, Lord Chatham in the House of Lords attacked ‘the secret influence of an invisible power;’ that ‘something behind the throne greater than the King himself;’ that ‘favourite, who had betrayed every man who had taken a responsible office. There was no safety, no security against his power and malignity. He himself had been duped when he least suspected treachery, at a time when the prospect was fair, and when the appearances of confidence were strong.’ Parl. Hist. xvi. 8423. On March 25, 1771, Alderman Townsend in the House of Commons said that many who supported the Ministers were ‘only solicitous to gratify the ambitious views of one aspiring woman, who, to the dishonour of the British name, is well known to direct the operations of our despicable Ministers. Does any gentleman wish to know to what woman I allude; if he does, I will tell him; it is to the Princess Dowager of Wales.’ Ib. xvii. 135. Colonel Barre wrote the next day to Lord Chatham:’It is very extraordinary that this language had no more apparent effect either on the House or the Ministry, than if it had been held concerning the mal-administration of the Duke of Saxe Gotha, or any even pettier Prince of the House of Saxony.’ Chatham Corres. iv. 134.

Note 27. See ante , pp. 161, 173.

Note 28. Wilkes was elected Alderman of the Ward of Farringdon Without on Jan. 27, 1769, while he was still in prison. On his release he was sworn in, on April 24,1770. Almon's Memoirs of Wilkes , iv. 1, 15. Horace Walpole wrote on May 6:’I don’t know whether Wilkes is subdued by his imprisonment, or waits for the rising of Parliament, to take the field; or whether his dignity of Alderman has dulled him into prudence, and the love of feasting; but hitherto he has done nothing but go to City-banquets and sermons, and sit at Guildhall as a sober magistrate.’ Letters , v. 235. On June 24, 1771, he was elected Sheriff. ‘Being suspected of partiality to the French, he ordered that no French wine should be given at his entertainments.’ Almon's Wilkes , iv. 172, and Ann. Reg. 1771, i. 149. Dr. Johnson lived in Wilkes's Ward, but not being a Freeman of the City he had no vote. Horace Walpole wrote on July 6, a few days after Wilkes's election as Sheriff:’Does there not seem to be a fatality attending the Court whenever they meddle with that man? Does not he always rise higher for their attempting to overwhelm him? What instance is there of such a demagogue, subsisting and maintaining a war against a King, Ministers, Courts of Law, a whole Legislature, and all Scotland, for nine years together? Massaniello did not, I think, last five days. Wilkes, in prison, is chosen Member of Parliament, and then Alderman of London. His colleagues betray him, desert him, expose him, and he becomes Sheriff of London. I believe, if he were to be hanged, he would be made King of EnglandI don’t think King of Great Britain (the Scots hate him too much).’ Letters , v. 313. Strahan's letter to Hume of July 23 is in the beginning so curiously like Walpole's, that it can scarcely be doubted that both men are repeating words they have heard. He says: ‘With regard to Wilkes, there seems to be a Fatality attending the Ministry whenever they meddle with him. In the late election for Sheriffs they should have taken no part at all. . . . Monday and Tuesday the election was plainly going against Wilkes, and he would most certainly have lost it. But the miscarriage and consequent publication of Mr. R.'s 1. letter had precisely the effect I apprehended, and set the London mob in a flame.’ M. S. R. S. E.

Sir John Pringle, writing to Hume on Feb. 25, 1776, tells an amusing story of the election for Chamberlain of the City, for which Wilkes was the unsuccessful candidate. He says:’One of Hopkins's party upbraided Mr. Wilkes by telling him, that he had made his friends upon polling go home, and after changing their coats return to the Hall, and vote a second time. “quot;My friends do so!” replies Wilkes; “Impossible! My friends have only one coat to their back.”’ M. S. R. S. E.

Junius, in his letter of April 3, 1770, mocks at ‘the blustering promises of Lord North,’ and tells how he had taken fright at the very moment when Welbore Ellis, set on by him, was going to move to prosecute the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs. ‘All their magnanimous threats ended in a ridiculous vote of censure, and a still more ridiculous address to the King. This shameful desertion so afflicted the generous mind of George the Third, that he was obliged to live upon potatoes for three weeks, to keep off a malignant fever. Poor man! quis talia fando temperet a lacrymis! ’

Mr. R. was Mr. Robinson, ‘the Secretary of a Public Office.’ A letter in which he canvassed for Aldermen Plumbe and Kirkman was delivered by mistake to the wrong person. ‘Its publication won a great many votes for Aldermen Wilkes and Bull.’ London Chronicle , June 29, 1771.

Note 29. The three per cents. Consols, on the day on which Hume wrote, were at 81 7/8. Gent. Mag. 1771, p. 288.

Note 1. Smollett in Roderick Random (ch. viii) describing his hero's journey from Scotland to London in 1739, says:—’There is no such convenience as a waggon in this country, and my finances were too weak to support the expense of hiring a horse; I determined therefore to set out with the carriers, who transport goods from one place to another on horseback; and this I accordingly put in execution, on the first day of November, 1739, sitting upon a pack-saddle between two baskets; one of which contained my goods in a knap-sack. By the time we arrived at Newcastle upon Tyne, I was so fatigued with the tediousness of the carriage, and benumbed with the coldness of the weather, that I resolved to travel the rest of my journey on foot.’ After having walked many days he hears one evening at a small town ‘that the waggon from Newcastle for London had halted there two nights ago, and that it would be an easy matter to overtake it, if not the next day, at farthest the day after the next.’ (Ch. x.) By walking at a great pace all the next day he caught it up in the evening. It seems likely that when the waggon began to go beyond Newcastle to Edinburgh it still kept its old name of the Newcastle Waggon. Churchill in 1763, in The Prophecy of Famine , speaking of Scotland, says:—

• ’What waggon-loads of courage, wealth and sense
• Doth each revolving day import from thence.’

Hume, on Nov. 22, 1762, directing Millar to send him some books, says:—’Be so good as to embark three copies in any parcel you send to Edinburgh. The peace will now make the intercourse of trade more open between us.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 140. Now that there was peace with France and Spain, there was no longer any dread of foreign cruisers. Johnson, even in time of peace, did not care to have anything sent to him by sea. He wrote to Boswell on Jan. 29, 1774:—’If anything is too bulky for the post, let me have it by the carrier. I do not like trusting winds and waves.’ Boswell's Johnson , ii. 272. Boswell writing on Dec. 2 had told him that next week his box should be sent him by sea. Ib. p. 270. It did not arrive till the very end of January. Ib. p. 272. An undergraduate of Queen's College, Oxford, was charged in the year 1778 two guineas for the conveyance of his box by carrier from a Cumberland village north of Carlisle to Oxford. Letters of Radcliffe and James , p. 46.

Note 2. Cadell's shop was in the Strand; Strahan's printing house was in New Street, Fetter Lane; where his descendants, the Messrs. Spottiswoode, still carry on the business.

Note 3. General Conway, Horace Walpole's cousin and correspondent, ‘married Catherine Campbell, Dowager Countess of Aylesbury, daughter of John, Duke of Argyle, by his wife, Mary Bellenden the beauty, and was the father by Lady Aylesbury of an only child, Mrs. Damer the sculptor, to whom Walpole left Strawberry Hill.’ Walpole's Letters , i. 38, n. 1.

Note 4. Inverary, the Duke of Argyle's castle, where Johnson and Boswell dined two years later. Boswell's Johnson , v. 355.

Note 5. It was published in eight volumes.

Note 6. As the quarto edition had been in eight volumes, four of its volumes would form five of the proposed edition.

Note 7. Strahan was not, for the sake of uniformity in size, to give part of a chapter in one volume, and part in another; and he was not to forget that in the last volume room must be left for the Index. Hume, like an honest man, made sometimes, if not always, his own Index. On Sept. 3, 1757, he wrote:— I have finished the Index to the new collection of my pieces; this Index cost me more trouble than I was aware of when I began it.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 36. See ante , p. 17, n. 1.

Note 8. The quarto sheet was the copy corrected by Hume, from which the new edition was to be printed. It sometimes happened that it contained a foot-note which in the new edition was to be printed among the notes at the end of each volume. In that case Hume, after correcting his proof-sheet, would return also the quarto sheet.

Note 9. See ante , p. 182.

Note 10. See ante , p. 202, n. 1.

Note 11. See post , Letter of March 15, 1773. Johnson for ‘a very few corrections in the Lives of the Poets was presented with a hundred guineas’ (Boswell's Johnson , iv. 35, n. 3); but this must be looked upon as a kind of ‘conscience money’ on the part of the booksellers, who had made a great sum by their bargain with him.

Note 12. Dr. Beattie says that ‘Mr. Strahan was eminently skilled in composition and the English language, excelled in the epistolary style, had corrected (as he told me himself) the phraseology of both Mr. Hume and Dr. Robertson.’ Forbes's Life of Beattie , ed. 1824, p. 341.

Note 13. It was not published till 1773.

Note 14. See post , second Letter of June 3, 1772.

Note 1. The author was William Eden, afterwards first Lord Auckland. Nichols's Literary Anecdotes , iii. 119. A second edition was published this same year.

Note 2. Horace Walpole speaks of Eden as ‘that superlative jackass’ ( Letters , vii. 426), and as ‘a most wicked coxcomb,’ who ‘had not sense or judgment enough to cloak his folly’ ( Ib. viii. 204). I have not done more than glance through the book. The superstitious passages I failed to discover, but I came on much that would not have been unworthy of Bentham or Romilly.

Note 3. Hume was not unwilling at times to assist in this universal deception. In 1764 he was consulted about a young man, whom, says his correspondent, ‘to speak plain language I believe to be a sort of disciple of your own;’ but whose hope of advancement lay in his taking orders in the English Church. Hume wrote back:—’What! do you know that Lord Bute is again all-powerful, or rather that he was always so, but is now acknowledged for such by all the world? Let this be a new motive for Mr. V— to adhere to the ecclesiastical profession, in which he may have so good a patron; for civil employments for men of letters can scarcely be found; all is occupied by men of business, or by parliamentary interest. It is putting too great a respect on the vulgar and on their superstitions to pique one's self on sincerity with regard to them. Did ever one make it a point of honour to speak truth to children or madmen? If the thing were worthy being treated gravely, I should tell him that the Pythian oracle, with the approbation of Xenophon, advised every one to worship the gods— [ww] 1. . I wish it were still in my power to be a hypocrite in this particular. The common duties of society usually require it; and the ecclesiastical profession only adds a little more to an innocent dissimulation or rather simulation, without which it is impossible to pass through the world. Am I a liar, because I order my servant to say, I am not at home, when I do not desire to see company?’ Burton's Hume , ii. 185–7.

Johnson recognises ‘the universal conspiracy of mankind against themselves;’ but though he may have yielded at times to the temptation of deceiving himself, he would never deceive others. As regards children and servants he was wide as the poles asunder from Hume. ‘Accustom your children,’ said he, ‘constantly to a strict attention to truth, even in the most minute particulars. If a thing happened at one window, and they, when relating it, say that it happened at another, do not let it pass, but instantly check them; you do not know where deviation from truth will end.’ Boswell's Johnson , iii. 228. ‘He would not allow his servant to say he was not at home when he really was. “A servant's strict regard for truth (said he) must be weakened by such a practice. A philosopher may know that it is merely a form of denial; but few servants are such nice distinguishers. If I accustom a servant to tell a lie for me , have I not reason to apprehend that he will tell many lies for himself? “’ Ib. i. 436. See post , Letter of March 24, 1773.

Memorabilis , i. 3. 1.

Note 4. Strahan, in his letter of July 23, had said:—’But supposing what you seem to apprehend to be unavoidable, if matters come to a public bankruptcy, it will not so materially effect the general prosperity of the nation as you and many others imagine. . . . But not to enter further into the consequences of an event, of which history affords no precedent, I think I may venture to say that the Stockholders will not tamely submit to be the only sufferers. The Debt is in fact a Debt upon the lands of Great Britain, these are the real Security, supported by the faith of the Legislature. It is impossible to conceive that the public creditors would suffer the land-holders to enjoy their full property, and undiminished by taxes too, whilst they were robbed of their all.’ M. S. R. S. E.

Hume, in a note on his Essay Of Public Credit , published nineteen years earlier, had said:—’I have heard it has been computed that all the creditors of the public, natives and foreigners, amount only to 17,000. These make a figure at present on their income; but in case of a public bankruptcy would in an instant become the lowest, as well as the most wretched of the people. The dignity and authority of the landed gentry and nobility is much better rooted; and would render the contention very unequal, if ever we come to that extremity. One would incline to assign to this event a very near period, such as half a century, had not our fathers’ prophecies of this kind been already found fallacious, by the duration of our public credit so much beyond all reasonable expectation. When the astrologers in France were every year foretelling the death of Henry IV, These fellows , says he, must be right at last. We shall therefore be more cautious than to assign any precise date; and shall content ourselves with pointing out the event in general.’ Hume's Phil. Works , ed. 1854, iii. 398. It was between the land-holders and the stock-holders that the struggle would lie, if it ever took place, because the land tax was at this time the chief war tax. It had been raised from three shillings to four shillings in the pound only eight months before on the threat of a war with Spain. Parl. Hist. xvi. 1330. Lord Macaulay, in describing the origin of the land-tax, says:—’The rate was, in time of war, four shillings in the pound. In time of peace, before the reign of George the Third, only two or three shillings were usually granted; and during a short part of the prudent and gentle administration of Walpole, the Government asked for only one shilling. But, after the disastrous year in which England drew the sword against her American Colonies, the rate was never less than four shillings.’ History of England , ed. 1874, vi. 325. A passage in Lord Sheffield's speech on April 2, 1798, on Pitt's Bill for the Redemption of the Land Tax shows his fear, that if the struggle of which Hume speaks were to take place, the land-holders would be the sufferers. He says:—’This was such a favourite tax that, he understood, as soon as it was sold, there was an intention of laying a new land-tax. Unfortunately for the country, those whose odious task it was to propose taxes did not always extend their knowledge beyond the bills of mortality. They were too much in the hands of monied men, who were so full of expedients relative to the funds, that they could seldom think of the interior circumstances of the country.’ Parl. Hist. xxxiii. 1374.

Note 5. Lord North, in his speech on the Budget for 1771, said:—’Trade flourishes in all parts of the kingdom; the American disputes are settled; and there is nothing to interrupt the peace and prosperity of the nation but the discontents which a desperate faction is fomenting by the basest falsehoods and with the most iniquitous views.’ Parl. Hist. xvii. 165. In 1772, speaking on the Budget, he said:—’At present there is the fairest prospect of the continuance of peace that I have known in my time. . . . The hypothesis of a ten years’ peace is by no means chimerical. The pacific dispositions of the French King, who regulates the motions of our great rival and antagonist, are well known. What then hinders us from cherishing this hope? I know I shall be laughed at for forming any calculation upon so precarious an event. . . . We see some, though no very certain prospect of gradually reducing the national debt.’ Ib. p. 489.

Note 6. Hume, at the end of chap. xxi. of his History , says:—’The first instance of debt contracted upon parliamentary security occurs in this reign [Henry the Sixth's]. The commencement of this pernicious practice deserves to be noted; a practice the more likely to become pernicious, the more a nation advances in opulence and credit. The ruinous effects of it are now become but too apparent, and threaten the very existence of the nation.’ Perhaps Johnson had heard this sentence quoted when, ‘speaking of the National Debt,’ he said to Dr. Maxwell, ‘it was an idle dream to suppose that the country could sink under it. Let the public creditors be ever so clamorous, the interest of millions must ever prevail over that of thousands.’ Boswell's Johnson , ii. 127. (See ante , p. 68.)

Adam Smith speaks of ‘the enormous debts which at present oppress, and will in the long run probably ruin all the great nations of Europe.’ ‘The practice of funding,’ he continues, ‘has gradually enfeebled every nation which has adopted it.’ After describing its effects on different nations he asks:—’Is it likely that in Great Britain alone a practice which has brought either weakness or dissolution into every other country should prove altogether innocent?’ Further on he adds:—’When national debts have once been accumulated to a certain degree, there is scarce, I believe, a single instance of their having been fairly and completely paid. The liberation of the public revenue, if it has ever been brought about at all, has always been brought about by a bankruptcy; sometimes by an avowed one, but always by a real one, though frequently by a pretended payment.’ Wealth of Nations , ed. 1811, iii. 392, 418, 420.

Note 7. A statement by Johnson in 1783, when the Debt had been raised by the American War from 129 to 268 millions, shows what a feeling of security there was even then in the stock-holders. He says:—’It is better to have five per cent. out of land than out of money, because it is more secure; but the readiness of transfer and promptness of interest make many people rather choose the funds.’ Boswell's Johnson , iv. 164.

Lord North on May 1, 1772, speaking of the Stocks, said:—Look back 25 years, and you will find that it is only since that period that they sold for less than their original value.’ Parl. Hist. xvii. 489. At the time he was speaking they were at 88. Gent. Mag. 1772, p. 200. The second Pitt, on April 2, 1798, said ‘the present price of three per cents. is about fifty.’ Parl. Hist. xxxiii. 1367. They were that year as low as 47. The year before, in the alarm of the Mutiny at the Nore, they had fallen to 48 ( Ann. Reg. 1797, ii. 162), when Hume's forebodings seemed likely to come true.

Note 8. Walter Scott was four days old when Hume wrote this letter. He was born at a short distance from James's Court, on August 15, 1771, in a house belonging to his father, at the head of the College Wynd.

Note 1. In Nichols's Literary History , i. 141, the following passage occurs in a letter by Daniel Wray, dated Oct. 15, 1771:—’Have you heard of the Congress at Inverary?. . . Though fifty beds were made, they were so crowded that even David Hume, for all his great figure as a Philosopher and Historian, or his greater as a fat man, was obliged by the adamantine peg-maker 1. to make one of three in a bed.’ Hume also visited Inverary in September, 1775. Burton's Hume , ii. 475.

• 'si figit adamantinos
• Summis verticibus dira Necessitas
• Clavos.’ Horace, 3 Odes , xxiv. 5.

Note 2. See ante , p. 215, n. 3.

Note 3. The Earl of Holdernesse had been a Secretary of State from 1751 to 1761. Hume wrote from Paris on April 26, 1764:—’It is almost out of the memory of man that any British has been here on a footing of familiarity with the good company except my Lord Holdernesse, who had a good stock of acquaintance to begin with, speaks the language like a native, has very insinuating manners, was presented under the character of an old Secretary of State, and spent, as is said, £10,000 this winter to obtain that object of vanity. Him, indeed, I met everywhere in the best company.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 194. Horace Walpole had written four months earlier to the Earl of Hertford, the English Ambassador at Paris:—’I have not mentioned Lady Holdernesse's presentation, though I by no means approve it, nor a Dutch woman's lowering the peerage of England. Nothing of that sort could make me more angry, except a commoner's wife taking such a step; for you know I have all the pride of

Letters , iv. 152. The Earl had married ‘in Holland a niece of Mr. Van Haaren, with £50,000.’ Gent. Mag. 1743, p. 612. Walpole wrote to George Montagu from Paris on Sept. 7, 1769:—’I could certainly buy many things for you here that you would like, the reliques of the last age's magnificence; but since my Lady Holdernesse invaded the Custom House with an hundred and fourteen gowns, in the reign of that two-penny monarch George Grenville, the ports are so guarded, that not a soul but a smuggler can smuggle anything into England; and I suppose you would not care to pay seventy-five per cent. on second-hand commodities.’ Letters , v. 184.

‘A senator of Rome, while Rome survived.’ Addison's Cate , Act v. sc. 4.

Note 4. This entry, which is, I believe, in Strahan's hand, probably gives the date on which the copy of the History had been sent to Lady Holdernesse.

Note 1. No doubt Dr. William Hunter, Professor of Anatomy in the Royal Academy, the eldest brother of John Hunter, the surgeon. Dr. A. Carlyle in his Auto. , p. 345, describes seeing him in 1758 at a Club of Scotch physicians which met at the British Coffee house. ‘Hunter was gay and lively to the last degree, and often came in to us at nine o’clock fatigued and jaded. He had had no dinner, but supped on a couple of eggs, and drank his glass of claret; for though we were a punch club, we allowed him a bottle of what he liked best. He repaid us with the brilliancy of his conversation. His toast was, “May no English nobleman venture out of the world without a Scottish physician, as I am sure there are none who venture in.” [Horace Walpole, Letters , iii. 229, speaks of him as ‘the man-midwife.’]. . . By his attendance on Lady Esther [Hester] Pitt he had frequent opportunities of seeing the great orator when he was ill of the gout, and thought so ill of his constitution that he said more than once to us, with deep regret, that he did not think the great man's life worth two years’ purchase; and yet Mr. Pitt lived for twenty years.’ See post , Letter of June 12, 1776, for John Hunter.

Note 2. See ante , p. 188, n. 11.

Note 3. Hume wished to receive by each post a quarto sheet of the old edition from which the new edition was printed, a fresh proof sheet, and also an old proof sheet after the compositors had attended to his last corrections. The weight of the packet would be such that only Mr. Fraser's frank would pass it free through the post.

Note 1. See ante , p. 200.

Note 2. See ante , p. 183.

Note 1. Franklin, writing from London on Jan. 13, 1772, says:—‘I have now been some weeks returned from my journey through Wales, Ireland, Scotland, and the North of England.’ Franklin's Works , ed. 1887, iv. 428. He had visited Edinburgh also in the autumn of 1759. See ib. iii. 39; Thomson's Life of Cullen , i. 139; and ante , p. 30, n. 3.

Hume wrote to Adam Smith on Feb. 13, 1774:—‘Pray, what strange accounts are these we hear of Franklin's conduct? I am very slow in believing that he has been guilty in the extreme degree that is pretended; though I always knew him to be a very factious man, and faction, next to fanaticism, is of all passions the most destructive of morality. How is it supposed he got possession of these letters? I hear that Wedderburne's treatment of him before the Council was most cruel, without being in the least blameable. What a pity!’ Burton's Hume , ii. 471.

Franklin had ‘obtained and transmitted to Boston’ some letters ‘written,’ to use his own words, ‘by public officers to persons in public stations on public affairs, and intended to procure public measures.’ Ann. Reg. 1773, i. 152. He was accused, altogether falsely he maintained, of having got possession of these letters by treachery. He used them to show that the Governor and Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts Bay were enemies to the Colony. The Assembly petitioned the King for their removal. The petition was referred to the Privy Council, before which Franklin was ordered to attend with counsel on Jan. 29. Wedderburne, the Solicitor-General, attacked him with great severity. He concluded his invective by saying:—‘Amidst these tranquil events here is a man who, with the utmost insensibility of remorse, stands up and avows himself the author of all. I can compare him only to Zanga in Dr. Young's Revenge :—

• “Know, then, ‘twas I— I forged the letter—I dispo’d the picture—
• I hated—I despis’d—and I destroy.”

I ask, my Lords, whether the revengeful temper attributed to the bloody African is not surpassed by the coolness and apathy of the wily American.’ Chatham Corresp. iv. 323. Franklin was dismissed from his office of Deputy Postmaster-General for the Colonies.

Dr. Priestley says that when Franklin appeared before the Privy Council, ‘he was dressed in a suit of Manchester velvet; and Silas Dean told me, that when they met at Paris to sign the treaty between France and America, he purposely put on that suit.’ Priestley's Works , xxv. 395.

Note 1. See ante , p. 188, n. 11.

Note 2. If only the proof sheet were sent the packet would not exceed two ounces—the limit of weight for an ordinary frank ( ante, ib. ).

Note 3. Franklin, I conjecture, had the right of franking either as Deputy Postmaster-General for the Colonies, or as Provincial Agent in England for several of the Colonies.

Note 4. For these names, see ante , p. 200. It is curious to see Franklin and Wedderburne, who in two years were to be opposed to each other in so memorable a scene, thus brought together.

Note 5. Burke wrote on July 31, 1771:—‘As to news, we have little. After a violent ferment in the nation, as remarkable a deadness and vapidity has succeeded. The Court perseveres in the pursuit, and is near to the perfect accomplishment of its project; but when the work is perfected, it may be nearest to its destruction, for the principle is wrong, and the materials are rotten.’ Burke's Corres. i. 256. In the Ann. Reg. for 1772, i. 82, describing the autumn, he says that the general apathy had not yet much pervaded London. ‘The citizens said that Government had set its face particularly against the City of London, in a manner that had been unknown since the Revolution.... That it had for some time acted, as if they were in an actual state of warfare with her.’

Horace Walpole wrote on Dec. 15:—‘We are so much accustomed to politics, that people do not know how to behave under the present cessation. We can go into the City without being mobbed, and through Brentford without “No. 45” on one's coach-door. Wilkes is almost as dead as Sacheverell, though Sheriff.’ Letters , v. 359. On Jan. 14, 1772, he wrote:—‘The Parliament meets next week. There will, I think, be little to do, unless an attempt to set aside the subscription of the clergy to the Thirty-nine Articles should stir up a storm. Religious disputes are serious; and yet can one care about shades of nonsense?’ Ib. p. 369.

Note 6. See ante , p. 187, n. 4.

Note 7. Lord Chatham, writing eight days after the date of Hume's letter, mentions ‘some sensations which begin to remind me of a winter account of gout to be balanced after a summer of more health than I have known these twenty years.’ Chatham Corres. iv. 186. Hume's prayer was only partly granted: Chatham was this session troubled with gout, but not so severely as in many other years. Ib. pp. 201, 3, 8, 217, 8. Burke in his Speech on American Taxation , on April 19, 1774, describing Chatham's second Ministry, says:—‘If ever he fell into a fit of the gout, or if any other cause withdrew him from public cares, principles directly the contrary [of his own] were sure to predominate.’ Payne's Burke , i. 145. In a letter dated Sept. 14, 1775, Burke doubts like Hume whether all Lord Chatham's attacks of gout were sincere. ‘Acquainted as I am,’ he writes, ‘with the astonishing changes of Lord Chatham's constitution (whether natural or political) I am surprised to find that he is again perfectly recovered. But so it is. He will probably play more tricks.’ Burke's Corres. ii. 63.

Note 8. Hume wrote to Elliot on May 11, 1758:—‘ Vanitas vanitatum, atque omnia vanitas , says the Preacher; the great object of us authors, and of you orators and statesmen, is to gain applause; and you see at what rate it is to be purchased. I fancy there is a future state to give poets, historians, philosophers their due reward, and to distribute to them those recompenses which are so strangely shared out in this life. It is of little consequence that posterity does them justice, if they are for ever to be ignorant of it, and are to remain in perpetual slumber in their literary paradise.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 44. ‘Posterity,’ wrote Johnson, ‘is always the author's favourite.’ Piozzi Letters , ii. 14.

Note 9. Hume had not yet moved into his new house. See post , p. 250, n. 3.

Note 10. The first three volumes of Lyttelton's Henry II appeared in 1764, and the conclusion in 1771. Lyttelton had begun to print it in 1755. Johnson's Works , viii. 492. It was said that ‘it was kept back several years for fear of Smollett.’ Boswell's Johnson , iii. 33. Hume, writing on April 20, 1756, says:—‘We hear of Sir George Lyttelton's History , from which the populace expect a great deal; but I hear it is to be three quarto volumes. “O, magnum, horribilem et sacrum Libellum 1 ” This last epithet of sacrum will probably be applicable to it in more senses than one. However, it cannot well fail to be readable, which is a great deal for an English book now-a-days.’ Burton's Hume , i. 433.

’dii magni, horribilem et sacrum libellum.’ Catullus, xiv. 12. ‘Gods! an horrible and deadly volume!’ Ellis.

Note 11. ‘Lyttelton had, in the pride of juvenile confidence, with the help of corrupt conversation, entertained doubts of the truth of Christianity; but he thought the time now come when it was no longer fit to doubt or believe by chance, and applied himself seriously to the great question. His studies, being honest, ended in conviction.’ Johnson's Works , viii. 490. Horace Walpole, describing on Oct. 19, 1765 the dulness of Parisian society, says:—‘Good folks, they have no time to laugh. There is God and the King to be pulled down first; and men and women, one and all, are devoutly employed in the demolition. They think me quite profane for having any belief left. But this is not my only crime; I have told them, and am undone by it, that they have taken from us to admire the two dullest things we had, Whisk (whist) and Richardson.—It is very true, and they want nothing but George Grenville to make their conversations, or rather dissertations, the most tiresome upon earth. For Lord Lyttelton, if he would come hither, and turn free-thinker once more, he would be reckoned the most agreeable man in France—next to Mr. Hume, who is the only thing in the world that they believe implicitly; which they must do, for I defy them to understand any language that he speaks.’ Letters , iv. 425.

Hume wrote to Adam Smith on July 14, 1767:—’Have you read Lord Lyttleton? Do you not admire his Whiggery and his Piety; Qualities so useful both for this World and the next?’ M. S. R. S. E. Hume could hardly have meant that Whiggery was good for the next world; for Johnson ‘always said that the first Whig was the devil’; and Boswell, after mentioning the altercation that passed between that stout old Whig, his father, and the Tory Johnson, continues:—‘I must observe, in justice to my friend's political principles, and my own, that they have met in a place where there is no room for Whiggism.’ Boswell's Johnson , iii. 326, v. 385.

Note 1. Robert Chambers, in his Traditions of Edinburgh , ed. 1825, i. 21, speaking of this time says, on the authority of ‘an ancient native of Edinburgh, that people all knew each other by sight. The appearance of a new face upon the streets was at once remarked, and numbers busied themselves in finding out who and what the stranger was.’

Note 2. He had not yet moved into his new house, which was outside the town. See post , p. 250, n. 3. Perhaps he spent most of his time there looking after the workmen. On Oct 2, 1770, he had written that he could not leave Edinburgh, as he was building a house. ‘By being present, I have already prevented two capital mistakes which the mason was falling into; and I shall be apprehensive of his falling into more, were I to be at a distance.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 436.

Note 3. Hume writing to a friend in 1753 says:—‘About seven months ago I got a house of my own, and completed a regular family; consisting of a head, viz. myself, and two inferior members, a maid and a cat. My sister has since joined me, and keeps me company. With frugality I can reach, I find, cleanliness, warmth, light, plenty, and contentment. What would you have more? Independence? I have it in a supreme degree. Honour? that is not altogether wanting. Grace? that will come in time. A wife? that is none of the indispensable requisites of life. Books? that is one of them; and I have more than I can use.’ Burton's Hume , i. 377.

Note 4. Philip, second Earl Stanhope. ‘He had great talents, but fitter for speculation than for practical objects of action. He made himself one of the best—Lalande used to say the best—mathematicians in England of his day, and was likewise deeply skilled in other branches of science and philosophy. The Greek language was as familiar to him as the English; he was said to know every line of Homer by heart. In public life, on the contrary, he was shy, ungainly, and embarrassed. So plain was he in his dress and deportment, that on going down to the House of Lords to take his seat, after a long absence on the Continent, the door-keeper could not believe he was a peer, and pushed him aside, saying, “Honest man, you have no business in this place.” “I am sorry, indeed,” replied the Earl, “if honest men have no business here.” Mahon's History of England , ed. 1838, iii. 242. Horace Walpole wrote on March 4, 1745:—‘Earl Stanhope has at last lifted up his eyes from Euclid, and directed them to matrimony.’ Letters , i. 344.

Note 5. This Essay must have been destroyed by Hume.

Note 6. See ante , p. 181, n. 25. Hume wrote to Millar on May 27, 1756:—‘I have no objection to Mr. Mitchels having a copy of the Dissertations. ’ M. S. R. S. E.

Note 7. The death of William Morehead, Esq., in Cavendish Square, on June 12, 1766, is recorded in the Gent. Mag. for that year, p. 295. He may have been the man mentioned by Hume.

Note 8. Hume wrote to Millar on June 12, 1755:—‘There are four short Dissertations which I have kept some years by me, in order to polish them as much as possible. One of them is that which Allan Ramsay mentioned to you. [ The Natural History of Religion. ] Another, of the Passions ; a third, of Tragedy ; a fourth, Some Considerations previous to Geometry and Natural Philosophy. ’ Burton's Hume , i. 421. ‘In 1783,’ says Dr. Burton, Ib. ii. 13, ‘a work was published in London called Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul, ascribed to the late David Hume, Esq., never before published; with remarks intended as an antidote to the poison contained in these performances, by the Editor. The editor and his antidote are now both forgotten; but the style of Hume and his method of thinking were at once recognised in these Essays, and they have been incorporated with the general edition of his works.... That Hume wrote these Essays, and intended to publish them, is thus an incident in his life which ought not to be passed over; but it is also part of his history that he repented of the act at the last available moment, and suppressed the publication.’ Dr. Burton says that ‘many copies of the first edition bear marks of having been mutilated. In a copy which I possess,’ he adds, ‘after p. 200, the end of the third Dissertation, there are four strips of paper, the remains of half a sheet, cut away. This occurs in signature K, and signature L begins with the fourth dissertation.’ (For signature see ante , p. 152, n. 6.) On April 23, 1764, Hume wrote to Millar from Paris:—‘I never see Mr. Wilkes here but at chapel, where he is a most regular, and devout, and edifying, and pious attendant; I take him to be entirely regenerate. He told me last Sunday, that you had given him a copy of my Dissertations, with the two which I had suppressed; and that he, foreseeing danger from the sale of his library, had wrote to you to find out that copy, and to tear out the two obnoxious dissertations. Pray how stands that fact? It was imprudent in you to intrust him with that copy: it was very prudent in him to use that precaution. Yet I do not naturally suspect you of imprudence, nor him of prudence. I must hear a little farther before I pronounce.’ Millar wrote back on June 5:—‘I take Mr. Wilkes to be the same man he was,—acting a part. He has forgot the story of the two Dissertations. The fact is, upon importunity, I lent to him the only copy I preserved, and for years never could recollect he had it, till his books came to be sold ; upon this I went immediately to the gentleman that directed the sale, told him the fact, and reclaimed the two Dissertations which were my property. Mr. Coates, who was the person, immediately delivered me the volume; and so soon as I got home, I tore them out and burnt them, that I might not lend them to any for the future. Two days after, Mr. Coates sent me a note for the volume, as Mr. Wilkes had desired it should be sent him to Paris; I returned the volume, but told him the two Dissertations I had torn out of the volume and burnt, being my property. This is the truth of the matter, and nothing but the truth. It was certainly imprudent for me to lend them to him.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 202. Wilkes wrote to Earl Temple that Cotes had sold his books in 1764 for £427. Grenville Papers , iv. 16. Cotes, who was his agent, seems to have robbed him. Ib. p. 3, note.

Note 1. It is a curious description of Essays on Suicide and on the Immortality of the Soul to call them imitations of the agreeable trifling of Addison.

Note 2. The note was added on p. 459 of vol. iv. of this edition. In the edition of 1778 it is given as a footnote on p. 163 of the same volume. It is as follows:—‘The parliament, in annulling the King's marriage with Anne Boleyn, gives this as a reason, “For that his highness had chosen to wife the excellent and virtuous lady Jane, who for her convenient years, excellent beauty, and pureness of flesh and blood, would be apt, God willing, to conceive issue by his highness.”’ Hume does not give his reference. Much the same was said by Lord Chancellor Audley in his speech on June 8, 1537. Parl. Hist. i. 529.

Note 1. John Balfour was an Edinburgh bookseller ( ante , p. 2, n. 2). On July 10, 1780, he wrote to Strahan:—‘Bookselling is at so low a pass that I have sometimes had thoughts of giving it up; it is a laborious business, at present without any profit, and it is only the hope of its amending that makes me continue.’ Barker MSS.

Note 1. Hume is speaking of only the first four volumes of the reprint of his History. See ante , p. 183.

Note 2. ‘The politest nations of Europe have endeavoured to vie with one another for the reputation of the finest printing.... If we look into the Commonwealths of Holland and Venice, we shall find that in this particular they have made themselves the envy of the greatest monarchies. Elzevir and Aldus are more frequently mentioned than any pensioner of the one of doge of the other.’ Addison, The Spectator , No. 367.

Note 3. ‘Si on demande quel fut dans notre Europe le premier auteur de ce style bouffon et hardi, dans lequel ont écrit Sterne, Swift et Rabelais, il parait certain que les premiers qui s’étaient signalés dans cette dangereuse carrière avaient été deux Allemands nés au quinzième siècle, Reuchlin et Hutten. Ils publièrent les fameuses Lettres des gens obscurs , longtemps avant que Rabelais dédiât son Pantagruel et son Gargantua au cardinal Odet de Châtillon.’ Œuvres de Voltaire , ed. 1819–25, xlii. 431. I have failed to discover anything that shows that Reuchlin was a printer.

Note 4. ‘Eodem anno [ MDLIX ] vivis exemptus est Robertus Stephanus Parisiensis typographus regius ... cui non solum Gallia sed universus Christianus orbis plus debet, quam cuiquam fortissimorum belli ducum ob propagatos fineis patria unquam debuit; majusque ex ejus unius industria quam ex tot praeclare bello et pace gestis, ad Franciscum decus et nunquam interitura gloria redundavit.’ Thuanus , ed. 1620, i. 708. Robert Stephens, or Stephanus, was born at Paris in 1503, died at Geneva in 1559. ‘Thuanus asserts that the Christian world was more indebted to him than to all the great conquerors it had produced, and that he contributed more to immortalize the reign of Francis I than all the renowned actions of that prince.’ Chalmers, Biog. Dict. xxviii. 371.

Note 5. A fount or font of type is ‘a complete assortment of types of one sort, with all that is necessary for printing in that kind of letter.’ Chambers's Ety. Dict. It is not defined in Johnson's Dictionary. Strahan had cast a fresh fount for this edition ( ante , p. 187, n. 6).

Note 6. She died on Feb. 8. Her name is given in the Index of Names in the Gentleman's Magazine for that year as ‘Wales Princess.’ Horace Walpole wrote of her on Feb. 12:—‘Nothing ever equalled her resolution. She took the air till within four or five days of her death, and never indicated having the least idea of her danger, even to the Princess of Brunswick, though she had sent for her. Although she had convulsions the day before she expired, she rose and dressed to receive the King and Queen, and kept them four hours in indifferent conversation, though almost inarticulate herself; said nothing on her situation, took no leave of them, and expired at six in the morning without a groan. She could not be unapprised of her approaching fate, for she had existed upon cordials alone for ten days.’ Letters , v. 374. Of Strahan's encomium, which was in the London Chronicle for Feb. 11, I will give a few extracts:—‘She is now in a state far superior to mortal praise or blame, where the lying and malignant voice of faction cannot reach her; and it will now be discovered and believed that never was a more amiable, a more innocent, or a more benevolent Princess. That she interfered in the politics of this country and influenced the King in affairs of state, we will venture to say was utterly void of foundation.... Though she constantly read all the public papers, the unmerited abuse with which they frequently abounded never excited in her the least emotion of anger or resentment.... She was for many years the very idol of the people of England.’

Note 7. See ante , p. 210, n. 26, for Alderman Townsend's attack on her in the House of Commons on March 25, 1771. Horace Walpold wrote on March 15, 1770:—‘As a prelude to what was to follow, rather as the word of battle, Lord Chatham some days ago declared to the Lords, that there is a secret influence (meaning the Princess) more mighty than Majesty itself, and which had betrayed or clogged every succeeding Administration. His own had been sacrificed by it. In consequence of this denunciation, papers to which the North Britons were milk and honey have been published in terms too gross to repeat. The Whisperer and The Parliamentary Spy are their titles. Every blank wall at this end of the town is scribbled with the words, Impeach the King's Mother ; and in truth I think her person in danger.’ Letters , v. 229.

Note 8. Horace Walpole wrote to Mann on Feb. 12, 1772:—‘The East Indies are going to be another spot of contention. Such a scene of tyranny and plunder has been opened as makes one shudder! The heaven-born hero 1 , Lord Clive, seems to be Plutus, the dæmon who does not give, but engrosses riches. There is a letter from one of his associates to their Great Mogul, in which our Christian expresses himself with singular tenderness for the interests of the Mahometan religion! We are Spaniards in our lust for gold, and Dutch in our delicacy of obtaining it.’ Letters , v. 375. On March 5 he wrote:—‘We have another scene coming to light, of black dye indeed. The groans of India have mounted to heaven, where the heaven-born General Lord Clive will certainly be disavowed. Oh! my dear sir, we have outdone the Spaniards in Peru! They were at least butchers on a religious principle, however diabolical their zeal. We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped—nay, what think you of the famine in Bengal, in which three millions perished, being caused by a monopoly of the provisions by the servants of the East India Company? All this is come out, is coming out—unless the gold that inspired these horrors can quash them.’ Ib. p. 378. On March 27 he added:—‘The House of Commons is going to tap the affairs of India, an endless labyrinth! We shall lose the East before we know half its history. It was easier to conquer it than to know what to do with it. If you or the Pope can tell, pray give us your opinion.’ Ib. p. 379.

The Select Committee of Enquiry into the East India Company was not appointed till April 13, 1772. Ann. Reg. 1772, i. 103. The King in his speech of Jan. 21, on opening Parliament, had said:—‘The concerns of this country are so various and extensive as to require the most vigilant and active attention, and some of them, as well from remoteness of place as from other circumstances, are so peculiarly liable to abuses and exposed to danger that the interposition of the legislature for their protection may become necessary.’ Parl. Hist. xvii. 233. In the Correspondence of George III with Lord North (i. 81) is given the following letter:—‘Queen's House, Jan. 6, 1772, 15 min. pt. 5 p.m. Lord North,—The sketch of the Speech meet with my approbation. When the sentences are a little more rounded ... I doubt not but it will make a very good one.’ On this the editor remarks:—‘The sentences are rounded , and almost without meaning.’ That so far from being without meaning, one of them was full of the weightiest meaning, implying at it did a parliamentary enquiry of the highest importance, is shown not only by Hume's mention of this enquiry seven weeks before it was appointed, but also by the Annual Register , 1772, i. 101, and 1773, i. 67. In the latter Burke says:—‘The mal-administration in India, with all its consequences, were [ sic ] suffered to pass without notice or observation; and we have already seen in the transactions of the year 1772 that, though the affairs of the Company were evidently alluded to at the opening of the session in the speech from the throne, they were nevertheless suffered to lie over till near its close, when a bill was brought in by the deputy-chairman for enlarging the controlling powers of the Company with respect to their servants in India. The bill came to nothing in that session. But a member, though in the King's service, not connected with Ministry, whether with or without their consent, at length awakened their attention to this object. This gave birth to the Select Committee, which was armed with full powers for all the purposes of enquiry. ’ The passage which I have printed in italics is some evidence of the truth of the report which had reached Hume.

According to Horace Walpole ( Memoirs of the Reign of George II , ed. 1822, ii. 276), Pitt, in a debate on the army estimates on Dec. 14, 1757, had described Clive as ‘that man, not born for a desk—that heaven-born general.’

Note 9. Andrew Stuart was the author of Letters to the Right Hon. Lord Mansfield. In them he attacked that judge for his conduct in the famous Douglas cause, when it came, on appeal, before the House of Lords. That this work, which was never on sale, had been written for publication is shown by the following passage in Strahan's letter to Hume of Jan. 25, 1773:—‘The Letters have been in Lord Mansfield's hands this fortnight, but I have not yet heard how he is affected by them. This will appear in due time. They are not yet made public, only distributed among his friends, but will be published in a few days.’ M.S.R.S.E. Johnson speaking about them to Boswell on April 27, 1773, said:—‘They have not answered the end. They have not been talked of; I have never heard of them. This is owing to their not being sold. People seldom read a book which is given to them.’ Boswell's Life of Johnson , ii. 229. Horace Walpole had written about it on Jan. 25:—‘There is a book you will see that makes and intends to make noise enough.... Indeed it is admirable, and it must be confessed that a Scot dissects a Scot with ten times more address than Churchill and Junius. They know each other's sore places better than we do.’ Letters , v. 430. On May 27 he wrote:—‘The book will be a great curiosity, for after all the author's heroism, fear or nationality have preponderated, and it will not be published.’ Ib. p. 466.

Hume, who was as strong against the successful litigant as Boswell was for him, of course sided with Andrew Stuart. ‘I was struck,’ he wrote on March 28, 1769, ‘with a very sensible indignation at the decision of the Douglas cause, though I foresaw it for some time. It was abominable with regard to poor Andrew Stuart, who had conducted that cause with singular ability and integrity; and was at last exposed to reproach which unfortunately never can be wiped off.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 423. According to Lord Campbell ( Lives of the Chancellors , ed. 1846, v. 494), Stuart took so ill the attack made on him in court by Thurlow, who was engaged as counsel on the other side, that he sent him a challenge. ‘Thurlow wrote back for answer that the desired meeting Mr. Stuart should have, but not till the hearing of the appeal was concluded.... They met in Kensington Gardens, and shots were exchanged—happily without effect. Mr. Stuart afterwards declared that Mr. Thurlow advanced and stood up to him like an elephant.’ Lord Campbell adds in a note:—‘A gentleman still alive, who remembers the duel well, says that Thurlow, on his way to the field of battle, stopped to eat an enormous breakfast at a tavern near Hyde Park Corner.’ Dr. Burton ( Life of Hume , ii. 425) says that it was not with Thurlow but with Wedderburne that Stuart fought. He corrects this statement in Letters of Eminent Persons to David Hume , p. 110. Neither he nor Lord Campbell gives any reference. Stuart was member for Lanarkshire in the Parliament elected in Nov. 1774. Parl. Hist. xviii. 29. In 1779 he and Gibbon became colleagues as Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations. Ib. 7, 29.

Note 10. It was not, says Burke, till the year 1767 that the affairs of the East India Company were first introduced into Parliament. Ann. Reg. 1773, i. 63. This introduction was regarded as a startling innovation. ‘The novelty of an English minister of state venturing to interfere, as an officer of the Crown, in a matter of private property excited in the highest degree the attention of all sorts of people.’ Ib. 1767, i. 43. By an annual payment by the Company to the Government of £400,000 a year a respite was purchased from state interference. Ib. i. 43 1 . In 1769, in the alarm caused by the news of Hyder Ali's successes in war, India stock had fallen above 60 per cent. in a few days. The Directors, ‘to put a stop to the abuses and mismanagements which had so much disgraced the Company's government in India,’ appointed three men ‘who should be invested with extraordinary powers, and sent to India under the character of Supervisors, with full authority to examine into and rectify the concerns of every department, and a full power of control over all their other servants in India.’ Ann. Reg. 1769, i. 53. The ship in which they sailed was never heard of. ‘The fate of these gentlemen,’ wrote Burke, ‘was undoubtedly one of the greatest misfortunes that could have befallen the Company.’ Ib. 1773, i. 66. It was brought to the brink of bankruptcy and ruin, and could not keep up its payment to the government. In their alarm at the appointment of the Parliamentary Committee the Directors resolved to send out new Supervisors. The resolution came too late. In Dec. 1772 a bill was rapidly carried through Parliament restraining the Company for six months from sending out any such Commission of Supervision. Ib. p. 73, and Parl. Hist. xvii. 651. Before the time had run out the Regulating Act was carried through both Houses, and Warren Hastings was appointed first Governor-General. ‘Thus,’ writes Burke, ‘this memorable revolution was accomplished. From that time the Company is to be considered as wholly in the hands of the ministers of the Crown.’ Ann. Reg. 1773, i. 105. Andrew Stuart was not named one of the four Councillors who were to assist the Governor-General. But among them was one who was a still bitterer enemy of Lord Mansfield—Philip Francis, the author of the Letters of Junius.

The pagination of the Annual Register is so clumsy that it is not always easy either to give or to find a reference. In the number from which I am quoting page 43 is found three times. My first reference is to the first page 43, my second to the second, which is separated from it by only eight pages and is distinguished by an asterisk.

Note 11. The Rev. Dr. Adam Ferguson, Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh. He had been tutor to the family of Lord Bute, and so had influence at Court. Burton's Hume , ii. 34, 45. Hume wrote to Adam Smith on Nov. 23 of this year:—‘Ferguson has returned, fat and fair, and in good humour, notwithstanding his disappointment, which I am glad of.’ Ib. p. 461. It was at his house that Scott, a lad of fifteen, saw Burns. Lockhart's Life of Scott , ed. 1839, i. 185. Scott in his review of John Home's Works records the following anecdote of him:—’dr. Adam Ferguson went as chaplain to the Black Watch or 42d Highland Regiment, when that corps was first sent to the Continent. As the regiment advanced to the Battle of Fontenoy, the commanding officer, Sir Robert Monro, was astonished to see the chaplain at the head of the column, with a broadsword drawn in his hand. He desired him to go to the rear with the surgeons, a proposal which Adam Ferguson spurned. Sir Robert at length told him that his commission did not entitle him to be present in the post which he had assumed. “D—n my commission,” said the warlike chaplain, throwing it towards his Colonel. It may easily be supposed that the matter was only remembered as a good jest; but the future historian of Rome shared the honours and dangers of that dreadful day, where, according to the account of the French themselves, “the Highland furies rushed in upon them with more violence than ever did a sea driven by a tempest.”’ Quarterly Review , lxxi. 196.

Lord Cockburn in his Memorials , p. 49, describes him in his old age as ‘a spectacle well worth beholding. His hair was silky and white; his eyes animated and light-blue; his cheeks sprinkled with broken red like autumnal apples, but fresh and healthy; his lips thin and the under one curled.’ In middle age he had had a severe paralytic attack, which so reduced his animal vitality that he always wore a good deal of fur. ‘His gait and air were noble; his gesture slow; his look full of dignity and composed fire. He looked like a philosopher from Lapland. His palsy ought to have killed him in his fiftieth year; but rigid care enabled him to live uncrippled, either in body or mind, nearly fifty years more. Wine and animal food besought his appetite in vain; but huge messes of milk and vegetables disappeared before him, always in the never failing cloth and fur.... He always locked the door of his study when he left it, and took the key in his pocket; and no housemaid got in till the accumulation of dust and rubbish made it impossible to put the evil day off any longer; and then woe on the family. He shook hands with us boys one day in summer 1793, on setting off in a strange sort of carriage, and with no companion except his servant James, to visit Italy for a new edition of his history. He was then about seventy-two, and had to pass through a good deal of war; but returned in about a year younger than ever.’ He was born in 1724 and died in 1816.

Note 12. Johnson would certainly have charged Hume with joining in what he calls ‘the Scotch conspiracy in national falsehood’ (Boswell's Johnson , ii. 297); and with sharing in that ‘national combination, so invidious that their friends cannot defend it,’ which is one of the chief means ‘which enables them to find, or to make their way to employment, riches, and distinction’ ( Works , ix. 158). No man was better than Hume at magnifying the merits of a countryman. As Ferguson was unsurpassed in the whole world in worth, so ‘Wilkie [the author of the Epigoniad ] was to be the Homer, Blacklock the Pindar, and Home the Shakespeare or something still greater of his country.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 32.

Note 1. Boswell records an anecdote of a tradesman ‘who having acquired a large fortune in London retired from business, and went to live at Worcester. His mind being without its usual occupation, and having nothing else to supply its place, preyed upon itself, so that existence was a torment to him. At last he was seized with the stone; and a friend who found him in one of its severest fits having expressed his concern, “No, no, Sir,” said he, “don’t pity me; what I now feel is ease compared with that torture of mind from which it relieves me.”’ Boswell's Johnson , iii. 176. See ib. ii. 337 for Johnson's story of an ‘eminent tallow-chandler’ in retirement.

Note 2. Strahan was like the old lieutenant in Tom Jones who, when asked by Tom how the practice of duelling could be reconciled with the precepts of Christianity, replied:—‘I remember I once put the case to our chaplain over a bowl of punch, and he confessed there was much difficulty in it; but he said, he hoped there might be a latitude granted to soldiers in this one instance; and to be sure, it is our duty to hope so; for who would bear to live without his honour? No, no, my dear boy, be a good Christian as long as you live; but be a man of honour too, and never put up an affront; not all the books, nor all the parsons in the world shall ever persuade me to that. I love my religion very well, but I love my honour more. There must be some mistake in the wording of the text, or in the translation, or in the understanding it, or somewhere or other. But however that be, a man must run the risk, for he must preserve his honour.’ Tom Jones , Bk. vii. ch. 13.

Note 3. Strahan is perhaps repeating the advice which his friend Johnson so often enforced. ‘To have the management of the mind is a great art,’ he said, and he often showed Boswell how it was to be done. Boswell's Johnson , ii. 440.

Note 4. As Strahan was to forward to Hume five sheets of proofs every week, there could not have been less than ten sheets, or 160 pages, always ‘passing to and fro.’ At the same time there were the perfect sheets which the printers were striking off, as well as those at which the compositors were still at work.

Note 5. Perhaps Strahan by italicising ‘worthy’ implies those of the London Aldermen who were among ‘the Patriots’; for worthy was the honourable appellation generally applied to them. See ante , p. 178, n. 7.

Note 6. The Gentleman's Magazine in the number for March, p. 122, praised her in terms not less extravagant than Strahan's. Nay it went farther, and spoke of Frederick Prince of Wales as ‘the best of husbands.’

Note 7. See ante , p. 238, n. 8. Horace Walpole, writing on April 9 of this year about Charles Fox's dissolute life and ‘manly reason,’ says:—‘We beat Rome in eloquence and extravagance; and Spain in avarice and cruelty; and, like both, we shall only serve to terrify schoolboys, and for lessons of morality!. “Here stood St. Stephen's Chapel; here young Catiline spoke; here was Lord Clive's diamond-house; this is Leadenhall Street, and this broken column was part of the palace of a company of merchants who were sovereigns of Bengal! They starved millions in India by monopolies and plunder, and almost raised a famine at home by the luxury occasioned by their opulence, and by that opulence raising the price of everything, till the poor could not purchase bread.” Conquest, usurpation, wealth, luxury, famine—one knows how little farther the genealogy has to go!’ Walpole's Letters , v. 381.

Note 8. ‘We are assured that a parliamentary enquiry into the conduct of the East India Company in Bengal was originally proposed by his Majesty himself, who was greatly shocked with the accounts he received of the oppressions exercised over the poor natives. It is indeed abundantly notorious that the behaviour of our countrymen in that extensive and once rich and populous region has been for some years past so cruel and barbarous as to call aloud to Heaven itself for a most speedy and effectual remedy.’ London Chronicle , Feb. 27, 1772.

Note 9. ‘We hear that all parties who have any influence in the conduct of our India affairs are unanimous in their choice of Andrew Stuart, Esq. of Berkeley-square to be one of the Supervisors. A Gentleman every way well qualified for that most important office; as he possesses c.’ Ib. We may be reminded by Strahan's puff of his countrymen of what Johnson says in his Life of Mallet :—‘It was remarked of Mallet that he was the only Scot whom Scotchmen did not commend.’ Works , viii. 464.

Note 10. Strahan must be speaking of his vote at the India House, for he was not in Parliament till November, 1774.

Note 11. ‘In the same year, in a year hitherto disastrous to mankind, by the Portuguese was discovered the passage of the Indies, and by the Spaniards the coast of America.’ Johnson's Works , vi. 233.

Note 12. Virgil, Æneid , iii. 57.

‘Gold-hunger cursed.’ Morris.

Note 1. The passage was restored, and ‘Government’ remained ‘happy.’ See Hume's History , ed. 1802, vi. 144. In the preceding sentence he had been describing the declaratory bill against monopolies passed in the year 1624. He continues:—‘It was there supposed that every subject of England had entire power to dispose of his own actions, provided he did no injury to any of his fellow-subjects; and that no prerogative of the King, no power of any magistrate, nothing but the authority alone of laws could restrain that unlimited freedom. The full prosecution c.’

Note 1. Strahan, no doubt thinking of Hume's suspicions of him—his ‘want of faith’ as he called it—had returned him the proof sheets of his History , so that he might see that all his corrections had been followed.

Note 2. Gibbon on Aug. 7, 1773, wrote to his friend Holroyd at Edinburgh:—‘You tell me of a long list of dukes, lords, and chieftains of renown to whom you are introduced; were I with you, I should prefer one David to them all. When you are at Edinburgh, I hope you will not fail to visit the sty of that fattest of Epicurus's hogs, and inform yourself whether there remains no hope of its recovering the use of its right paw.’ Gibbon's Misc. Works , ii. 110. See post , p. 253, for Hume's resolution to write no more.

Note 3. Hume's abuse of the English recalls a passage in Boswell's Life of Johnson , iii. 170, where Boswell says:—‘I ventured to mention [to Dr. Johnson] a person who was as violent a Scotsman as he was an Englishman; and literally had the same contempt for an Englishman compared with a Scotsman that he had for a Scotsman compared with an Englishman; and that he would say of Dr. Johnson, “Damned rascal! to talk as he does of the Scotch.” This seemed for a moment “to give him pause.” It perhaps presented his extreme prejudice against the Scotch in a point of view somewhat new to him, by the effect of contrast. ’

Note 1. Captain Patrick Brydone published in the spring of 1773 ( Gent. Mag. 1773, p. 242) his Tour through Sicily and Malta, in a Series of Letters to William Beckford, Esq. of Somerly in Suffolk. Boswell ( Life of Johnson , ii. 468) mentions ‘an antimosaical remark introduced into Captain Brydone's entertaining tour, I hope heedlessly, from a kind of vanity which is too common in those who have not sufficiently studied the most important of all subjects.’ Brydone had met at Catania a Canon, Recupero by name, who had measured in a drawwell ‘the strata of lavas, with earth to a considerable thickness over the surface of each stratum. Recupero has made use of this as an argument to prove the great antiquity of the eruptions of his mountain [Etna]. For if it requires two thousand years or upwards to form but a scanty soil on the surface of a lava, there must have been more than that space of time betwixt each of the eruptions which have formed these strata... He tells me he is exceedingly embarrassed by these discoveries in writing the history of the mountain;—that Moses hangs like a dead weight upon him, and blunts all his zeal for enquiry; for that really he has not the conscience to make his mountain so young as that prophet makes the world. What do you think of these sentiments from a Roman Catholic divine? The bishop, who is strenuously orthodox—for it is an excellent see—has already warned him to be upon his guard, and not to pretend to be a better natural historian than Moses.’ Brydone's Tour , ed. 1790, i. 141. Johnson remarked on this passage:—‘Shall all the accumulated evidence of the history of the world, shall the authority of what is unquestionably the most ancient writing be overturned by an uncertain remark such as this?’ Boswell's Johnson , ii. 468. At another time he said:—‘If Brydone were more attentive to his Bible he would be a good traveller.’ Ib. iii. 356.

Cowper, writing to Joseph Hill on April 20, 1777, says:—‘Thanks for a turbot, a lobster, and Captain Brydone; a gentleman who relates his travels so agreeably that he deserves always to travel with an agreeable companion.’ Cowper's Works , xv. 38.

Horace Walpole, describing on Oct. 10, 1780 an evening that he had spent at a lady's house, says:—‘Lord and Lady North were there, en cour plénière , with... and Brydone, the Sicilian traveller, who having wriggled himself into Bushy [Lord North's house] will, I suppose, soon be an envoy, like so many other Scots.’ Letters , vii. 451. Mr. Scott of Gala describes a conversation which he had with Sir Walter Scott in the autumn of 1831, who had come to London on his way to the Mediterranean. ‘“I paid a visit,” said Sir Walter, “to my friend Whittaker [the bookseller] to ask him for some book of travels likely to be of use to me on my expedition to the Mediterranean. Here's old Brydone accordingly, still as good a companion as any he could recommend. Brydone was sadly failed during his latter years. Did you ever hear of his remark on his own works?” “Never.” “Why his family usually read a little for his amusement of an evening, and on one occasion he was asked if he would like to hear some of his travels to Sicily. He assented, and seemed to listen with much pleasure for some time, but he was too far gone to continue his attention long, and starting up from a doze exclaimed, “That's really a very amusing book, and contains many curious anecdotes. I wonder if they are all true.”’ Lockhart's Life of Scott , ed. 1839, x. 109.

Note 2. Almost all the editions of The Spectator were in eight volumes, octavo.

Note 3. Hume had moved from James's Court in the Old Town to his new house in the New Town. ‘I charge you,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘not to think of settling in London, till you have first seen our New Town, which exceeds anything you have seen in any part of the world.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 462. Samuel Rogers, who visited Edinburgh in July, 1789, made the following entry in his Journal:—‘July 16, 1789. Adam Smith said that Edinburgh deserved little notice; that the old town had given Scotland a bad name; that he was anxious to move into the new town.... He said that in Paris as well as in Edinburgh the houses were piled one upon another.’ Early Life of Samuel Rogers , p. 92. The new town was laid out on the plan of ‘the ingenious architect,’ Mr. Craig, nephew of the poet Thomson. Boswell's Johnson , iii. 360. Hume was one of the earliest settlers. His house, which he had been nearly two years in building ( ante , p. 171, n. 22), looks northward into St. Andrew's Square and westward into St. David Street, or as he wrote it St. David's Street. Dr. J. H. Burton says that the street got its name from the daughter of Chief Baron Ord, ‘a witty young lady, who chalked on the wall of Hume's house the words “St. David Street.” The allusion was very obvious. Hume's “lass” [maid-servant], judging that it was not meant in honour or reverence, ran into the house much excited, to tell her master how he was made game of. “Never mind, lassie,” he said; “many a better man has been made a saint of before.” Burton's Hume , ii. 436. I have noticed that his earlier letters written from his new house he dates ‘St. Andrew's Square.’ This address he gives in his letter of Sept. 20, 1775 (Burton's Hume , ii. 475); but on Oct. 27 of the same year he writes ‘St. David's Street’ ( ib. p. 478). It is likely that Miss Ord had christened the street in the interval. Hume's adoption of the new name shows that he was pleased with it. Perhaps his is the only instance of a man who preferred to name his house, not after the fashionable square into which the front of it looked, but after a side street. In the codicil to his will, dated August 7, 1776, he shows his kindness for the young lady:—‘I leave to Mrs. Anne Ord, daughter of the late Chief Baron, ten guineas to buy a Ring, as a Memorial of my Friendship and Attachment to so amiable and accomplished a Person.’ M. S. R. S. E. The Court of Exchequer of Scotland, of which the Judges were the High Treasurer of Great Britain, with a Chief Baron and four other Barons, was established by the 6th Anne, cap. 26. Penny Cyclo. x. 110. Lord Cockburn in his Memorials , pp. 295—300, describing the introduction into Scotland in the year 1816 of a Jury Court in civil cases, says:—‘One great outcry against this Court at first was excited by our being required to adopt the English unanimity of juries. We had been accustomed to it for above a century in the Exchequer, which was an English Court. But its sittings were solely in Edinburgh, and its verdicts were of a penal nature.’ Writing of the year 1830 he says ( ib. p. 466):—‘Nobody could dream of making judicial work out of our Exchequer sufficient to give occupation even to a single judge.’

Note 1. Of this edition I cannot find any mention in any catalogue. Strahan in his letter of Feb. 27 of this year ( ante , p. 244) speaks of it as nearly ready.

Note 2. By ‘the other Volumes’ Hume means the last four volumes of his History. The whole work was ready for publication in the following March.

Note 1. Dr. Thomas Percy, afterwards Dean of Carlisle and Bishop of Dromore, the author of Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. He spelt his name Percy, and not Piercy. He wrote to Hume:—‘The name is not, nor ever was, properly written Piercy.’ M. S. R. S. E. Hume however keeps to his own way of spelling. Mr. H. B. Wheatley in the Preface to his edition of the Reliques says (p. lxxi):—‘Percy's father and grandfather were grocers, spelt their name Piercy, and knew nothing of any connection with the noble house of Northumberland.’ The Bishop boasted however of being the heir male of the ancient Percies. Boswell had examined the proofs of this claim, and says, ‘Both as a lawyer accustomed to the consideration of evidence, and as a genealogist versed in the study of pedigrees, I am fully satisfied.’ Boswell's Johnson , iii. 271. Percy, for the honour of his line, some years later on withstood Johnson, as he now withstood Hume. Johnson had praised Pennant's Tour in Scotland. ‘Percy,’ says Boswell, ‘could not sit quietly and hear a man praised who had spoken disrespectfully of Alnwick Castle and the Duke's pleasure grounds, especially as he thought meanly of his travels.’ The result was an explosion, in which Johnson cried out,—‘Hold, Sir! Don’t talk of rudeness; remember, Sir, you told me (puffing hard with passion struggling for a vent) I was short-sighted. We have done with civility. We are to be as rude as we please.’ Ib.

Note 2. Hume at the end of his chapter on the reign of Henry VII says:—‘It must be acknowledged, in spite of those who declaim so violently against refinement in the arts, or what they are pleased to call luxury, that as much as an industrious tradesman is both a better man and a better citizen than one of those idle retainers who formerly depended on the great families; so much is the life of a modern nobleman more laudable than that of an ancient baron.’ History of England , ed. 1802, iii. 400. As a note he added (p. 460) the extract from the House-hold Book of the fifth Earl of Northumberland. Dr. Percy, in a letter to Hume dated Jan 5, 1772 [an error for 1773], complaining that he called ‘the management of the Earl's family niggardly,’ maintains that ‘what might appear extremely penurious now, might at that time have been exceedingly liberal.’ To prove this he proposes to examine the accounts of other households, and begs Hume ‘to suspend his asperities till the next edition.’ Hume, as is shown by his next letter to Strahan, overcome by Percy's ‘very obliging manner’ and wishful to avoid giving the family ‘great offence,’ has the note reprinted. What was struck out besides niggardly I do not know. Enough however remains to have stirred up the Percy blood, had any great quantity of it flowed in the veins of the modern Percies. ‘My Lord,’ he writes, ‘passes the year in three country seats, all in Yorkshire; but he has furniture only for one. He carries everything along with him, beds, tables, chairs, kitchen utensils, all which we may conclude were so coarse that they could not be spoilt by the carriage. Yet seventeen carts and one waggon suffices for the whole... It is amusing to observe the pompous and even royal style assumed by this Tartar chief: he does not give any orders, though only for the right making of mustard, but it is introduced with this preamble, It seemeth good to us and our council. ’ Ib. p. 463.

In the Errata to the edition of 1773 Hume still further ‘suspends his asperities;’ but in the last edition, in two instances, he shows that it was merely a suspense. He writes:—‘After the words this time , read, it was Henry Algernon Percy, fifth earl of Northumberland, a nobleman no less distinguished by his personal merit than by the greatness of his family, one of the noblest in Europe.’ This correction is omitted in the edition of 1778. In the description given on p. 462 of the linen in the Earl's household he had said:—‘This linen was made into eight table-cloths for my lord's table, and one table-cloth for the knights. This last, I suppose, was washed only once a month.’ In the Errata he says ‘dele these words.’ They are nevertheless allowed to stand in the edition of 1778. It was not by accident that this was done, for some of the corrections in the same passage were made in the later edition.

Note 1. The Duke of Northumberland had little concern in the matter, for he was not a Percy, but a Smithson. He had married the great-grand-daughter of the eleventh and last Earl of Northumberland. Horace Walpole wrote on Feb. 25, 1750:—‘Sir Hugh Smithson and Sir Charles Windham are Earls of Northumberland and Egremont, with vast estates; the former title, revived for the blood of Percy, has the misfortune of being coupled with the blood of a man that either let or drove coaches—such was Sir Hugh's grandfather!’ Letters , ii. 196. The name of Sir Hugh Smithson I have often read on the list of benefactors to the poor in the parish church of Tottenham High Cross. The district in that parish ridiculously called Northumberland Park, for there neither is nor ever was a park, takes its name from a house which belonged to the Smithsons.

Note 2. This passage is, I think, the following, in which Hume describes Lewis XIV's liberality in rewarding literary merit:—‘Besides pensions conferred on learned men throughout all Europe, his academies were directed by rules and supported by salaries: A generosity which does great honour to his memory; and in the eyes of all the ingenuous part of mankind will be esteemed an atonement for many of the errors of his reign.’ Ed. 1773, viii. 330. Ingenuous is a misprint for ingenious. In the first edition I find ingenious , but in the quarto edition of 1770 ingenuous.

Note 3. Strahan had written to Hume on Jan. 25:—‘I have at length agreed, but after much difficulty with Capt. Brydon. You had raised his Expectations so very high, and so much beyond the real Worth of the Book, which will hardly make two Octavo Volumes very loosely printed, that he could not be satisfied with the very utmost the Size and Nature of the Book would admit of. You spoil all young Authors by leading them to expect Prices only due to Veterans in Literature, and Men of established Reputation.’ M. S. R. S. E.

Note 4. Travels through Sicily and part of Italy, by Baron Riedesel. Translated from the German by John Forster. London, 1773.

Note 5. Johnson the year before, speaking of a book of travels, had said that it was an imitation of Sterne. Boswell's Johnson , ii. 175.

Note 6. As an example of Brydone's style I will quote the following story:—’do you remember old Huet—the greatest of all originals? One day, as he passed the statue of Jupiter in the Capitol, he pulled off his hat, and made him a bow. A Jacobite gentleman who observed it asked him, why he paid so much respect to that old gentleman. “For the same reason,” replied Huet, “that you pay so much to the Pretender. Besides,” added he, “I think there is rather a greater probability that his turn will come round again than that of your hero. I shall therefore endeavour to keep well with him, and hope he will never forget that I took notice of him in the time of his adversity.”’ Vol. i. p. 158.

Note 7. He had been appointed to high offices, and had retired on a pension of £400 a year, with a request from the King that he would continue his History ( ante , p. 55). He had been paid for it, as he boasted, at a higher rate than any previous writer ( ante , p. 33, n. 2), and for its continuation he was told that the booksellers were ready to give him whatever sum he chose to name ( ante , p. 54). These unmanly complaints are in striking contrast with Johnson's contentment. ‘I asked him,’ writes Boswell, ‘if he was not dissatisfied with having so small a share of wealth, and none of those distinctions in the state which are the objects of ambition. He had only a pension of three hundred a year. Why was he not in such circumstances as to keep his coach? Why had.he not some considerable office? J OHNSON. “Sir, I have never complained of the world; nor do I think that I have reason to complain. It is rather to be wondered at that I have so much.”’ Boswell's Johnson , iv. 116.

Note 8. Three years later Hume wrote to Gibbon, on reading the first volume of the Decline and Fall :—‘Whether I consider the dignity of your style, the depth of your matter, or the extensiveness of your learning, I must regard the work as equally the object of esteem; and I own, that if I had not previously had the happiness of your personal acquaintance, such a performance from an Englishman in our age would have given me some surprise. You may smile at this sentiment, but as it seems to me that your countrymen, for almost a whole generation, have given themselves up to barbarous and absurd faction, and have totally neglected all polite letters, I no longer expected any valuable production ever to come from them.’ The high position that Hume held among men of learning is shown by what Gibbon has recorded:—‘A letter from Mr. Hume overpaid the labour of ten years.’ Misc. Works , i. 224.

Hume has the less excuse for the outburst in the text against the factiousness of the English, as Strahan in his last letter, dated Jan. 25, had said:—‘Our pretended patriots are either asleep or appear to be so. In short Wilkes and Liberty are heard of no more.’ M. S. R. S. E.

Note 9. Strahan had written to Hume on Jan. 25:—‘After what you now tell me I altogether despair of seeing a continuation of your History from yourself; but I have some notion it may be done by some other hand; perhaps Sir John Dalrymple or Mr. Macpherson.’ M. S. R. S. E. The latter volumes of Smollett's History have been so generally taken by the booksellers as a continuation of Hume, that it is commonly believed that he was, as an historian, merely his ‘continuator.’ He had however published his Complete History of England from the descent of Julius Cæsar to the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, 1748 , before Hume had done more than bring out the History of England under the Stuarts. Hume however had completed his work before Smollett, with the help of William Guthrie, published the five concluding volumes which carried down his History to the year 1765. On March 12, 1759, Hume wrote to Dr. Robertson, whose History of Scotland had just been published:—‘A plague take you! Here I sat near the historical summit of Parnassus, immediately under Dr. Smollett; and you have the impudence to squeeze yourself by me, and place yourself directly under his feet.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 53. This was not Hume's real opinion. He knew his superiority as an historian to Smollett, who in fourteen months had written the history of eighteen centuries. Writing to Millar on April 6, 1758, Hume said:—‘I am afraid that the extraordinary run upon Dr. Smollett has a little hurt your sales. But these things are only temporary.’ M. S. R. S. E.

Note 10. Hume wrote to Adam Smith on April 10, 1773:—‘Have you seen Macpherson's Homer ? It is hard to tell whether the attempt or the execution be worse. I hear he is employed by the booksellers to continue my History. But, in my opinion, of all men of parts he has the most anti-historical head in the universe.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 467. See ante , p. 36, n. 1, and post , Letter of Nov. 13, 1775.

Note 11. Sir John Dalrymple of Cranston was more than a knight; he was a baronet. See ante , p. 180, n. 22, for Johnson's criticism of his Memoirs. He ridiculed his style also when he and Boswell were on their way to his house, where they had been invited to dine and spend the night. They had loitered so much that they could not, they saw, arrive in time for dinner. ‘When I talked,’ writes Boswell, ‘of the grievous disappointment it must have been to him that we did not come to the feast that he had prepared for us, (for he told us he had killed a seven-year old sheep on purpose,) my friend got into a merry mood, and jocularly said, “I dare say, Sir, he has been very sadly distressed: Nay, we do not know but the consequence may have been fatal. Let me try to describe his situation in his own historical style:... —“Dinner being ready, he wondered that his guests were not yet come. His wonder was soon succeeded by impatience. He walked about the room in anxious agitation; sometimes he looked at his watch, sometimes he looked out at the window with an eager gaze of expectation, and revolved in his mind the various accidents of human life. His family beheld him with mute concern. ‘Surely (said he with a sigh) they will not fail me.’ The mind of man can bear a certain pressure; but there is a point when it can bear no more. A rope was in his view; and he died a Roman death.”’ Ib. v. 403. There is a hit at him in the Parl. Hist. xvii. 963, in the report of the proceedings in the Lords on the question of literary property on Feb. 7, 1774. He was heard as counsel for the defendants, ‘and spoke for two hours and a half, and seemed to exhaust in this one speech all the knowledge, metaphysical, legal, chemical, and political he possesses.’

Note 12. Dr. John Douglas, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, whom Goldsmith in Retaliation describes as ‘The scourge of impostors, the terror of quacks.’ See Boswell's Johnson , i. 228, 407. In Samuel Rogers's Table Talk , p. 106, it is recorded that ‘Hume told Cadell, the bookseller, that he had a great desire to be introduced to as many of the persons who had written against him as could be collected. Accordingly, Dr. Douglas, Dr. Adams, etc., were invited by Cadell to dine at his house, in order to meet Hume. They came; and Dr. Price, who was of the party, assured me that they were all delighted with David.’ Dr. Douglas had edited the Correspondence of the second Earl of Clarendon and of his brother the Earl of Rochester, etc. Hume wrote to Millar on Oct. 27, 1760:—‘I am very much pleased with what you tell me, that the Clarendon Papers have fallen into Dr. Douglas's hands, especially as Dr. Robertson tells me he intends to publish them.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 87.

Note 13. See ante , p. 239, n. 9. Hume suggests none but Scotchmen. Even Goldsmith is not mentioned, though he was not an Englishman and ‘a factious barbarian,’ and though his ‘ History ,’ if we may trust Johnson, ‘is better than the verbiage of Robertson, or the foppery of Dalrymple.’ Boswell's Johnson , ii. 236.

Note 14. See ante , p. 63, for a letter in which Horace Walpole, writing of the Scotch, says:—Do not let us be run down and brazened out of all our virtue, genius, sense, and taste by Laplanders and Bœotians, who never produced one original writer in verse or prose.’ Letters , vii. 511. At the time when Hume wrote of England that ‘you may as well think of Lapland for an author,’ there certainly was a dearth of eminent writers who were Englishmen by birth. In the previous ten years had died Churchill, Young, Sterne, Chatterton and Gray. Johnson, Warburton, Blackstone, Horace Walpole, and Lord Chesterfield were living, but the fame of the last two chiefly rests on their Letters which were not as yet published. Cowper, Crabbe, Gibbon, Jeremy Bentham, and Miss Burney had begun to publish before another ten years had run out. Wordsworth and Coleridge, though born, were still too young even ‘to lisp in numbers.’ Burke, Goldsmith, and R. B. Sheridan, who brought out his first play two years later, must be excluded as they were Irish by origin. Scotland boasted of Hume, Boswell, Adam Smith, Robertson, Beattie, Blair, Henry, Henry Mackenzie, Reid, the Dalrymples, Ferguson, Kames and Monboddo; but many of these, instead of lasting as ‘northern lights,’ have turned out to be ‘mere farthing candles’ (Boswell's Johnson , v. 57). Smollett had been dead rather more than a year, Burns was a boy of fourteen, and Scott an infant.

Note 15. Johnson said of Sterne's great work:—‘Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.’ Boswell's Johnson , ii. 449. Horace Walpole spoke of it as ‘a very insipid and tedious performance’; ‘the dregs of nonsense, which have universally met the contempt they deserve.’ Letters , iii. 298, 382. Goldsmith in the Citizen of the World (Letter 74) called the author ‘a bawdy block-head.’ Speaking of him to Johnson, he said he was ‘a very dull fellow’; to which Johnson replied, ‘Why, no, Sir.’ Boswell's Johnson , ii. 222. Voltaire looked on Sterne as ‘le second Rabelais d’Angleterre’; Swift being the first. Elig;uvres de Voltaire , ed. 1819–25, xxxiv. 513.

Note 16. The exception of Franklin has a somewhat comical effect when we call to mind that in ‘these thirty years’ had been published Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison, Tom Jones and Amelia , the great Dictionary , the Rambler and Rasselas , Collins's Odes , and all Gray's Poems. It is highly probable however that Hume, who was a thorough Frenchman in his love of paying pretty compliments, thought that this passage would be shown to Franklin. Strahan had added as a postscript to his last letter, which Hume had just received:—’dr. Franklin, who sits at my elbow, desires to be affectionately remembered to you and to your worthy sister, who was so kind to him.’ M. S. R. S. E.

Hume, writing to Adam Smith on April 1, 1776, about the first volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall , said:—‘I should never have expected such an excellent work from the pen of an Englishman. It is lamentable to consider how much that nation has declined in literature during our time.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 487. Voltaire, the year following, in a short criticism on the French translation of Tristram Shandy , said:—‘Il eῦt été à désirer que le prédicateur n’e∘t fait son comique roman que pour apprendre aux Anglais à ne plus se laisser duper par la charlatanerie des romanciers, et qu’il eῦt pu corriger la nation qui tombe depuis long-temps, abandonne l’étude des Locke et des Newton pour les ouvrages les plus extravagans et les plus frivoles.’ Œuvres de Voltaire , xlii. 430.

Note 17. Andrew Stuart's Letters to Lord Mansfield. See ante , p. 239, n. 9. Hume on Feb. 24 of this year, advising Adam Smith to buy this work, says:—‘They have, they say, met with vast success in London. Andrew has eased his own mind, and no bad effects are to follow. Lord Mansfield is determined absolutely to neglect them.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 466. ‘Dr. Johnson maintained that this publication would not give any uneasiness to the Judge. “For (said he) either he acted honestly, or he meant to do injustice. If he acted honestly, his own consciousness will protect him; if he meant to do injustice, he will be glad to see the man who attacks him so much vexed!”’ Boswell's Johnson , ii. 475.

Note 18. See ante , p. 141, n. 7.

Note 19. Hume is so full of his own affairs that he forgets to congratulate Strahan on the following piece of family news in a letter dated Jan. 25:—‘My son George is now Vicar of Islington, with an income of between £300 and £400 a year; a populous and increasing parish, within half an hour's walk of my own house. The purchase however cost a good deal of money, though less than these things usually come to.’ M. S. R. S. E. It was to George Strahan's vicarage that ‘Johnson went sometimes for the benefit of good air.’ Boswell's Johnson , iv. 271.

Note 1. See ante , p. 213.

Note 2. See ante , p. 203, n. 6.

Note 3. See ante , pp. 144, 150, 154.

Note 1. This letter, though written a day later than Strahan's answer to Hume's letter of the 15th, had not, of course, been received by Strahan when he wrote. I therefore give it before the next letter in the series.

Note 2. This must be the second volume of Dalrymple's Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland , for the first was published in the spring of 1771 ( ante , p. 174). This work excited great anger among the Whigs. ‘I mentioned,’ records Boswell on April 3 of this year, ‘Sir John Dalrymple's Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland , and his discoveries to the prejudice of Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney. J OHNSON. “Why, Sir, everybody who had just notions of government thought them rascals before. It is well that all mankind now see them to be rascals.... This Dalrymple seems to be an honest fellow; for he tells equally what makes against both sides.’ Boswell's Johnson , ii. 210.

Hume, in the note mentioned in the next sentence of his letter, says:—‘It is amusing to observe the general, and I may say national rage, excited by the late discovery of this secret negotiation [with the French Court]; chiefly on account of Algernon Sidney, whom the blind prejudices of party had exalted into a hero. His ingratitude and breach of faith in applying for the King's pardon, and immediately on his return entering into cabals for rebellion, form a conduct much more criminal than the taking of French gold. Yet the former circumstance was always known, and always disregarded. But everything connected with France is supposed in England to be polluted beyond all possibility of expiation. Even Lord Russell, whose conduct in this negotiation was only factious, and that in an ordinary degree, is imagined to be dishonoured by the same discovery.’ History of England , ed. 1802, viii. 43.

In a letter to Adam Smith dated April 10, 1773, Hume says:—‘Have you seen Sir John Dalrymple? It is strange what a rage is against him, on account of the most commendable action in his life. His collection is curious; but introduces no new light into the civil, whatever it may into the biographical and anecdotical history of the times.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 467. Horace Walpole wrote on March 2:—‘Need I tell you that Sir John Dalrymple, the accuser of bribery, was turned out of his place of Solicitor of the Customs for taking bribes from brewers?’ Letters , v. 441. A fortnight later he wrote:—‘The town and the newspapers have so fully discussed the book, that I neither listen to the one nor read the other. If it is comfortable to any scoundrel to find himself in better company than he expected, to be sure he has nothing to do but to be introduced by Sir John Dalrymple into History.’ Ib. p. 451.

Note 3. Hume corrects Dalrymple's mistake in the following words:—‘Sir John Dalrymple has given us from Barillon's dispatches in the Secretary's office at Paris a more particular detail of these intrigues.’ Hume hereupon gives a list of the men with whom they were carried on, and continues:—‘Of these Lord Russel and Lord Hollis alone refused to touch any French money. All the others received presents or bribes from Barillon. But we are to remark that the party view of these men and their well-founded jealousies of the King and Duke engaged them, independently of the money, into the same measures that were suggested to them by the French ambassador. The intrigues of France therefore with the Parliament were a mighty small engine in the political machine.’ History of England , viii. 43.

Note 4. Hume wrote to Dr. Robertson from Paris on Dec. 1, 1763:—‘I have here met with a prodigious historical curiosity, the Memoirs of King James II in fourteen volumes, all wrote with his own hand, and kept in the Scots College. I have looked into it, and have made great discoveries.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 179. ‘These volumes,’ adds Dr. Burton, ‘were lost during the French Revolution. It is said that an attempt was made to convey them to St. Omers; but having to be committed for some time to the care of a Frenchman, his wife became alarmed lest the regal emblems on the binding might expose the family to danger from the Terrorists. She first cut off the binding and buried the manuscripts, but being still haunted by fears she exhumed and burned them.’ Some of these volumes had narrowly escaped destruction a little more than a hundred years earlier, when the London house of the minister of the Grand Duke of Tuscany was sacked in the Revolution of 1688. Macaulay's History of England , ed. 1873, iii. 300. The note which Hume had added to his History is given in vol. viii. p. 4 of the edition of 1802.

Note 5. The same statement had been made, but falsely, about Dalrymple's first volume. See ante , p. 174. Perhaps the price mentioned is that for the whole work. Dalrymple, when pleading on May 10 of this year at the bar of the House of Commons against the Booksellers’ Copyright Bill, said:—‘It had been thrown out against him, that after having sold for £2000 the copy of a book, which had the misfortune universally to displease, although it was universally read, he had taken an active part to destroy the value of the very property which he had so disposed of.’ Parl. Hist. xvii. 1092.

Strahan fortunately kept a copy of his answer to Hume, for the original is not preserved among the Hume Papers in the possession of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.

Note 1. Strahan wrote to Hume on May 14, 1769, in answer to a letter which I have not seen:—‘I received your note yesterday. You are in truth the greatest sceptic I ever met with. I have again and again assured you (as I hereby do once more) that you shall most certainly have as many copies of this 4to. edition of your History as you choose to have. Not one of them shall go out of my hands till you are satisfied. The moment the index and titles are printed off the six copies you now ask for shall be sent you. But to send you them before that, would only be a needless incumbrance. If you had a single grain of faith in my promise, you would not only believe this, but believe also, what I have often told you, that everything regarding your Works in future shall be regulated by your own will and directions;—in the manner of printing;—in the number of impressions;—and in everything wherein your interest or fame may be affected. Do learn to put a little confidence in me; nor imagine that because I was induced to deceive you a little in regard to the number printed of the last 8vo. edition, that I am to make a practice of doing so. In that I was only the mouth of another person, who was afterwards sorry he had occasion to conceal the number of the impression from you.’ M. S. R. S. E.

Note 2. See ante , p. 256.

Note 3. This is perhaps one of the earliest instances that can be found of this use of the word object ; a use sanctioned, so far as I know, by no correct writer.

Note 4. They had become free agents when Millar in 1767, retiring from business, left Cadell as his successor. Cadell and Strahan were not, I think, partners in business generally, though they undertook many publications in common.

Note 5. Beattie's book is his Essay on Truth , in which that amiable poet was supposed to have confuted Hume. The University of Oxford rewarded him by the degree of Doctor of Civil Law, and Reynolds painted him in his Doctor's gown, with his Essay under his arm, preceded by the Angel of Truth who is beating down the vices, Envy, Falsehood, etc. These were represented by a group of figures, among whom, it was said, could be discovered the likenesses of Hume and Voltaire. Goldsmith reproached the painter with ‘degrading so high a genius as Voltaire before so mean a writer as Dr. Beattie; for Dr. Beattie and his book together will, in the space of ten years, not be known ever to have been in existence, but your allegorical picture and the fame of Voltaire will live for ever to your disgrace as a flatterer.’ Northcote's Life of Reynolds , ed. 1819, i. 300.

Sir William Forbes in his Life of Beattie , ed. 1824, p. 81, says that he and Mr. Arbuthnot were commissioned by Beattie to sell the manuscript of the Essay. They were met by a positive refusal from the bookseller to whom they applied (no doubt Cadell); who offered however to publish it at the author's risk. To this they knew that Beattie would never agree. They thereupon, resorting to a friendly artifice, became themselves the purchasers of the copyright of the first edition, giving fifty guineas for it, but concealing the fact from the author. ‘Had it not been,’ writes Forbes, ‘for this interference of ours, perhaps the Essay on Truth , on which all Dr. Beattie's future fortunes hinged, might never have seen the light. It also strongly marks the slender opinion entertained by the booksellers at that period of the value of a work which has since risen into such wellmerited celebrity.’ Beattie, on receiving a draft for the money, wrote to Forbes on Oct. 26, 1769:—‘The price does really exceed my warmest expectations; nay I am much afraid that it exceeds the real commercial value of the book; and I am not much surprised that—[Cadell or Strahan] refuses to have a share in it, considering that he is one of the principal proprietors of Mr. Hume's works, and in consequence of that may have such a personal regard for him as would prevent his being concerned in any work of this nature.’ Ib. p. 83. In less than four years Beattie's defence of orthodoxy was rewarded by a pension of £200 a year ( ib. p. 151); just half what his antagonist ‘the infidel pensioner Hume 1 ’ received from the same Court. So rapid was the sale of the Essay that Cadell and Strahan must have felt that, in refusing it, they had made a great sacrifice to their friendship for Hume. It reached a fourth edition in two years and a half. Forbes's Beattie , p. 134. Strahan in 1783, when Hume was no longer living, published Beattie's Dissertations. Ib. p. 301.

Boswell's Johnson , ii. 317.

Note 6. This is the word that Hume had used ( ante , p. 263).

Note 7. See ante , p. 263.

Note 8. See ante , p. 253.

Note 9. See ante , p. 256.

Note 10. Just one month later Boswell records:—‘On Monday, April 19, Dr. Johnson called on me with Mrs. Williams, in Mr. Strahan's coach, and carried me out to dine with Mr. Elphinston [Strahan's brother-in-law] at his academy at Kensington. A printer having acquired a fortune sufficient to keep his coach was a good topic for the credit of literature.’ Boswell's Johnson , ii. 226.

Note 1. See ante , pp. 138, 144, 150, 154.

Note 2. See ante , p. 217, n. 3, for the base advice which he gave to a young clergyman. The indifference that Hume shows to truth illustrates, though it does not justify, Lord Shelburne's harsh saying that ‘the generality of Scotchmen had no regard to truth whatever.’ Fitzmaurice's Life of Shelburne , i. 89. Johnson limited this untruth-fulness to their ‘disposition to tell lies in favour of each other.’ Boswell's Johnson , ii. 296. Dr. A. Carlyle, who was a man of great virtue, records without any sign of shame, a lie which he told in the General Assembly of the year 1766, by which the House, which had been disturbed by the sudden death of one of its members, was composed, and went on with its voting. Though he knew that the man was dead, he ‘gave out that there were hopes of his recovery.’ Carlyle's Autobiography , p. 467.

Note 3. Strahan had written to Hume on March 1, 1771:—‘The octavo edition of your History must undoubtedly soon be cleared.’ On May 25 of the same year he wrote, speaking of the new edition which he was going to print:—‘If I am not mistaken, this book will be wanted before this edition is finished.’ M. S. R. S. E.

Note 4. ‘I deny,’ said Johnson, ‘the lawfulness of telling a lie to a sick man for fear of alarming him. You have no business with consequences; you are to tell the truth. Besides, you are not sure what effect your telling him that he is in danger may have. It may bring his distemper to a crisis, and that may cure him. Of all lying, I have the greatest abhorrence of this, because I believe it has been frequently practised on myself.’ Boswell's Johnson , iv. 306. Miss Burney heard George III in one of his attacks of madness say:—‘I am nervous, I am not ill, but I am nervous; if you would know what is the matter with me, I am nervous. But I love you both very well, if you would tell me truth. I love Dr. Heberden best, for he has not told me a lie; Sir George [Baker] has told me a lie—a white lie, he says, but I hate a white lie! If you will tell me a lie, let it be a black lie.’ Mme. D’Arblay's Diary , ed. 1842, iv. 289. See ante , p. 217, n. 3, for a passage in which Johnson insists on the importance of accustoming children to a strict attention to truth; and ante , p. 156, where Hume declares himself ‘a good Casuist.’

Note 5. Johnson also had a difference with Strahan, that lasted from March till the end of July, 1778, when he wrote to him:—

‘ Sir ,

‘It would be very foolish for us to continue strangers any longer. You can never by persistency make wrong right. If I resented too acrimoniously, I resented only to yourself. Nobody ever saw or heard what I wrote. You saw that my anger was over, for in a day or two I came to your house. I have given you longer time; and I hope you have made so good use of it as to be no longer on evil terms with, Sir,

‘On this,’ said Mr. Strahan, ‘I called upon him; and he has since dined with me.’ Boswell's Johnson , iii. 364.

What effect Hume's letter had on Strahan there is nothing to show. There seems however to have been an interruption in their correspondence for ten months.

Note 1. See ante , p. 239, n. 9.

Note 2. The Home Government of the East India Company consisted at this time of a Court of Proprietors, and a Court of Directors elected by the Proprietors. Four Courts of Proprietors, or General Courts, were held regularly in each year. The qualification for a vote in the Court of Proprietors was raised by Lord North's Regulating Act of 1773 from £500 to £1000 of stock. ‘According to the Constitution the supreme power was vested in the Court of Proprietors.... To act under their ordinances and manage the business of routine was the department reserved for the Court of Directors.... Nevertheless all power has centered in the Court of Directors, and the government of the Company has been an oligarchy in fact. So far from meddling too much, the Court of Proprietors have not attended to the common affairs even sufficiently for the business of inspection.’ Mill's Hist. of British India , ed. 1858, iii. 2, 348.

Note 3. ‘Feb. 1, 1774. The following question was at a General Court of Proprietors of East India Stock determined by ballot:— “That it is the opinion of this Court, that it be recommended to the Court of Directors to appoint Col. Robert Gordon Commander-in-Chief of the Forces at the Presidency of Bombay, by rescinding the late appointment of Col. Stuart to that command.”

Gent. Mag. 1774, p. 90.

Colonel Stuart therefore lost his appointment; but the following letter about him from Andrew Stuart to Hume, dated July 10, 1775, seems to show that he was not long in receiving another:—‘It is still in the power of a General Court of Proprietors to overturn what has been established by the Court of Directors with so much unanimity.... We have every reason to believe that in a Court of Proprietors we should now carry the point by a very splendid majority.’ M. S. R. S. E. I cannot find that this time any adverse vote was taken in the Court of Proprietors.

Note 1. On Feb. 22, 1774, a decision was given in the House of Lords on the question of literary property or copyright, by which, to use the words of the Annual Register (XVII. i. 95), ‘Near £200,000 worth of what was honestly purchased at public sale, and which was yesterday thought property, is now reduced to nothing.... The English booksellers have now no other security in future for any literary purchase they may make but the statute of the 8th of Queen Anne, which secures to the author's assigns an exclusive property for 14 years, to revert again to the author, and vest in him for 14 years more.’ Boswell tells how an Edinburgh bookseller, Alexander Donaldson by name, ‘had for some years opened a shop in London, and sold his cheap editions of the most popular English books, in defiance of the supposed common-law right of Literary Property.’ Boswell's Johnson , i. 437. How strictly this copyright had been maintained is shown in the judgment pronounced by Lord Camden, who says:—‘Shakespeare's works, which he left carelessly behind him in town when he retired from it, were surely given to the public if ever author's were; but two prompters, or players behind the scenes, laid hold of them, and the present proprietors pretend to derive that copy from them, for which the author himself never received a farthing.’ Parl. Hist. xvii. 1000. William Johnston, a retired bookseller, in the evidence which he gave two or three weeks later before a Committee of the House of Commons, said that he had held in whole or in part the copyright of Camden's Britannia , Dryden's Works , Locke's Works , and Steele's Tatler , and that, by the threat of filing a bill in Chancery, he had restrained a Coventry bookseller from publishing an edition of The Pilgrim's Progress. Ib. p. 1082. Lord Camden, who as Chancellor for some years enjoyed an income which was reckoned at £13,000 a year 1 , took a very lofty view of the position of authors. ‘Glory (he said) is the reward of science, and those who deserve it scorn all meaner views. I speak not of the scribblers for bread, who teaze the press with their wretched productions; fourteen years is too long a privilege for their perishable trash. It was not for gain that Bacon, Newton, Milton, Locke instructed and delighted the world; it would be unworthy such men to traffic with a dirty bookseller for so much a sheet of a letterpress.’ Ib. p. 1000. Dunning (afterwards Lord Ashburton), ‘the great lawyer,’ as Johnson called him 2 , in his speech for the booksellers had said:—‘Authors formerly, when there were few readers, might get but small prices for their labour; that however had not of late years been the case. Hume's History of England and Dr. Robertson's History of Scotland had been amply paid for.... How was this difference to be accounted for? Not from any uncommon generosity in the booksellers, not from any superiority in point of merit in the books, but from the idea of a common-law right prevailing, and from that idea being established by the determination of the Court of King's Bench in the case of Millar v. Taylor.’ Ib. p. 967. I suspect that the Whig ex-Chancellor Camden, when he sneered at those authors ‘who traffic with a dirty bookseller,’ aimed a blow, which was not too covert to be seen, at the Tory historian, David Hume, and perhaps at the Tory King's-Printer, William Strahan.

The booksellers and authors had been ‘hoist with their own petar.’ Up to the passing of the statute of Anne they had by common law a perpetual copyright. That Act was passed, not to limit their right, but to give them additional powers for enforcing it. In ‘one of the Cases given to the Members in 1709 in support of their application for a bill,’ it was stated:—‘...By common law a bookseller can recover no more costs than he can prove damage: But it is impossible for him to prove the tenth, nay perhaps the hundredth part of the damage he suffers; because a thousand counterfeit copies may be dispersed into as many different hands all over the kingdom, and he not be able to prove the sale of ten. Besides, the defendant is always a pauper; and so the plaintiff must lose his costs of suit. Therefore the only remedy by the common law is to confine a beggar to the Rules of the King's Bench or Fleet; and there he will continue the evil practice with impunity. We therefore pray that confiscation of counterfeit copies be one of the penalties to be inflicted on offenders.’ Burrow's Reports of Cases in the Court of King's Bench , iv. 2318. In the preamble to the Act we read:—‘Whereas printers ... have of late frequently taken the liberty of printing ... books and other writings, without the consent of the authors or proprietors of such books and writings, to their very great detriment, and too often to the ruin of them and their families: for preventing therefore such practices for the future, and for the encouragement of learned men to compose and write useful books,’ c. Statutes at Large , xii. 82.

Blackstone, in the first edition of the second volume of his Commentaries published in 1766, says:—‘But exclusive of such copyright as may subsist by the rules of the common law, the statute 8 Anne c. 19 hath protected by additional penalties the property of authors and their assigns for the term of fourteen years; and hath directed that, if at the end of that term the author himself be living, the right shall then return to him for another term of the same duration.’ ii. 407.

The booksellers do not seem to have made much use of the new Act, but to have had recourse, as before, to the Court of Chancery. William Johnston, in his examination before the Committee, ‘being asked why it was not the custom of those who are possessed of copyright to enter them in the books of the Stationers’ Company? He said, he could only answer for himself, that he never thought the penalties prescribed by the Act of the eighth of Queen Anne were worth contending for, as a much shorter and more complete relief might be had by filing a bill in Chancery.’ Parl. Hist. xvii. 1085.

It was not till the year 1769 that in the case of Andrew Millar v. Robert Taylor ‘the old and often litigated question concerning literary property received a determination in the Court of King's Bench.’ Burrow's Reports , iv. 2303. Taylor had reprinted Thomson's Seasons , of which Millar had bought the various copyrights between the years 1727–9. Millar laid his damages at £200. The Jury brought in a special verdict, assessing the damages at one shilling with forty shillings cost. The Lord Chief Justice Mansfield and Justices Willes and Aston held that the perpetual copyright had not been taken away by the Statute of Anne. Justice Yates differed from them. Lord Mansfield prefaced his judgment by a statement which may well excite our wonder. He had now presided over his Court for more than twelve years, yet he was able to say:—‘This is the first instance of a final difference of opinion in this Court, since I sat here. Every order, rule, judgment and opinion has hitherto been unanimous. ’ ‘This,’ says the Editor, ‘gives weight and dispatch to the decisions, certainty to the law, and infinite satisfaction to the suitors. And the effect is seen by that immense business which flows from all parts into this channel; and which we who have long known Westminster Hall behold with astonishment.’ Burrow's Reports , iv. 2395.

By this decision the claim of the booksellers for a perpetual copyright seemed to be established; but the matter came before the House of Lords in the case of Donaldsons v. Becket and others, upon an appeal from a decree of the Court of Chancery founded upon this judgment. Ib. p. 2408. There they found to their dismay that the very weapon which their predecessors had forged against their enemies threatened them now with what in their first alarm seemed almost a deadly wound. They at once began to take measures to protect their property. On Feb. 28 they presented a petition to the House of Commons praying for relief. A Committee was appointed to take evidence, and on their report leave to bring in a Copy-right Bill was carried by 54 to 16. Burke was a teller for the majority and Fox for the minority. The smallness of the numbers seems to show great indifference to literature on the part of the members. The Bill was carried through the Commons, the highest total number on any division being 83, and Fox being persistent and violent in his opposition. It was lost in the Lords by 21 to 11. Parl. Hist. xvii. 1077, 1089, 1402. Burke, in one of his speeches, said:—‘The learned advocate has told us that glory is the only reward sought by the Scotch booksellers; let them have their glory,—let the petitioners have [their] property—we will not quarrel about terms.’ Ib. p. 1102. Very likely the ‘ostensible letter’ of which Hume speaks is the one mentioned by Mr. Mansfield, one of the counsel for the London booksellers; who at the bar of the House of Commons, on May 13, said:—‘I have by me letters of Mr. Hume, Dr. Robertson, c., containing the warmest wishes to the petitioners, lamenting the late decision of the House of Peers as fatal to literature, and hoping that the booksellers might get speedy relief.’ Ib. 1098.

In the Act of Anne there was a provision which I have not seen anywhere noticed. A Court of Arbitration was established in case ‘any bookseller shall set a price upon any book as shall be conceived by any person to be too high and unreasonable.’ The Court was to be composed of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Chancellor, Bishop of London, the two Chief Justices, Chief Baron, Vice-Chancellors of Oxford and Cambridge, Lord President of the Sessions, Lord Justice General, Lord Chief Baron, and the Rector of the College of Edinburgh. They were to have ‘full power to limit and settle the price of books from time to time, according to the best of their judgments, and as to them shall seem just and reasonable.’ Statutes at Large , xii. 84. This provision was repealed by 12 G. II. c. 36. Burrow's Reports , iv. 2390.

Walpole's Memoirs of George III , iv. 45.

Boswell's Johnson , iii. 128.

Note 2. Baretti in his Account of Manners and Customs of Italy , published in 1768, says:—‘It is the general custom for our authors to make a present of their works to booksellers, who in return scarcely give a few copies when printed.... Our learned stare when they are told that in England there are numerous writers who get their bread by their productions only.’ vol. i. p. 236. He was, he said, ‘the first man that ever received copy-money in Italy.’ Boswell's Johnson , iii. 162.

Note 3. Pompous still retained the meaning of ‘splendid, magnificent, grand’; to adopt Johnson's definition. In his Rasselas (Clarendon Press ed. p. 110) he says:—‘The most pompous monument of Egyptian greatness ... are the Pyramids.’

Note 4. Hume must be speaking of the judgment delivered by Lord Mansfield in the Court of King's Bench in the case of Millar v. Taylor, for he declined speaking on the appeal; ‘it being very unusual, from reasons of delicacy, for a peer to support his own judgment upon an appeal to the House of Lords.’ Burrow's Reports , iv. 2417. Lord Camden, in attacking the arguments maintained on the side of the booksellers, talks of the ‘variety of subtle reasoning and metaphysical refinements, by which they have endeavoured to squeeze out the spirit of the common law from premises in which it could not possibly have existence.’ Parl. Hist. xvii. 992. He adds:—‘I pass over the flimsy supposition of an implied contract between the bookseller who sells, and the public which buys the printed copy; it is a notion as unmeaning in itself as it is void of a legal foundation.’ Ib. p. 1000. There had been ‘subtle reasoning and metaphysical refinements’ on both sides. Mr. Justice Aston said:—‘It has been ingeniously, metaphysically, and subtilly argued on the part of the Defendant, “That there is a want of property in the thing itself. ”’ Burrow's Reports , iv. 2336. Mr. Justice Yates had asked:—‘Now where are the indicia or distinguishing marks of ideas? What distinguishing marks can a man fix upon a set of intellectual ideas, so as to call himself the proprietor of them? They have no ear-marks upon them; no tokens of a particular proprietor.’ Ib. p. 2366. To this Lord Mansfield replied:—‘If the copy belongs to an Author after publication, it certainly belonged to him before. But if it does not belong to him after, where is the Common Law to be found which says “there is such a property before”? All the metaphysical subtilties from the nature of the thing may be equally objected to the property before. It is incorporeal : It relates to ideas detached from any physical existence. There are no indicia : Another may have had the same thoughts upon the same subject, and expressed them in the same language verbatim ,’ c. Ib. p. 2397. Johnson, who all along held that there was no such common-law right of literary property as was supposed, nevertheless ‘was very angry that the booksellers of London, for whom he uniformly professed much regard, should suffer from an invasion of what they had ever considered to be secure; and he was loud and violent against Mr. Donaldson. “He is a fellow who takes advantage of the law to injure his brethren; for, notwithstanding that the statute secures only fourteen years of exclusive right, it has always been understood by the trade , that he who buys the copyright of a book from the author obtains a perpetual property; and upon that belief numberless bargains are made to transfer that property after the expiration of the statutory term.”’ Boswell's Johnson , i. 437. The London booksellers protected themselves by an ‘honorary copyright, which,’ wrote Boswell in 1791, ‘is still preserved among them by mutual compact.’ Ib. iii. 370.

Note 5. See post , where Hume in his letter of June 8, 1776, says:—‘Two posts ago I sent you a Copy of the small Essay which I mentioned.’ No doubt this Essay is the one entitled Of the Origin of Government , which first appears in the edition of 1777. Hume's Philosophical Works , ed. 1854, iii. 34.

Note 1. See ante , p. 275, n. 1. Hume seems to think that as such feeble opposition had been shown when the Copyright Bill was brought in, it was certain to be carried. I cannot find what was the length of time during which the booksellers claimed that the exclusive property in a book should continue. Leave was moved to bring in a Bill ‘for relief of booksellers and others, by vesting the copies of printed books in the purchasers of such copies from authors or their assigns, for a time therein to be limited.’ Parl. Hist. xvii. 1086.

Note 2. The Rev. Dr. Robert Wallace published in 1752 Dissertations on the Populousness of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times , as a reply to Hume's Essay of the Populousness of Ancient Nations. Hume describes it as ‘an answer full of politeness, erudition, and good sense.’ Phil. Works , ed. 1854, iii. 410. ‘Malthus admitted that Dr. Wallace was the first to point distinctly to the rule, that to find the limits of the populousness of any given community, we must look at the quantity of food at its disposal.’ Burton's Hume , i. 364. He is mentioned in Humphry Clinker (ed. 1792, iii. 6) as one of ‘the authors of the first distinction,’ of which Edinburgh that ‘hot-bed of genius’ could boast, and in Dr. A. Carlyle's Autobiography (p. 239) as having had a great part in establishing in Scotland the Ministers’ Widows’ Fund. By one of the letters of his son, George Wallace, in the Barker MSS. I learn that the work which he had left finished at his death was a Treatise on Taste. Though a minister of the Scotch Church he had even written notes on Gallini's Treatise on Dancing. Home's Works , i. 17. Ramsay of Ochtertyre says that soon after Wallace became a preacher somebody ‘in a large company of Episcopalians regretted so genteel a young man should be a Presbyterian minister. “Oh,” said George Home of Argaty; “that puts me in mind of what I heard a wife say t’other day to her neighbour, on her regretting that a handsome lad should be made a town-officer—‘Have a little patience; ere seven years he will be as ill-looking as the worst-favoured of them.’” So low was their opinion of Presbyterian accomplishments.’ Scotland and Scotsmen , ii. 552.

Note 3. For this ‘tacit convention,’ or ‘honorary copyright,’ see ante , p. 279, n. 4. The witnesses against the Copyright Bill complained that ‘they were not admitted to the Booksellers’ sales.’ Parl. Hist. xvii. 1093.

Note 4. The title-page of the Delphine Virgil is as follows:— P. Virgilii Maronis Opera. Interprelatione et Notis illustravit Carolus Ruœus, Soc. Jesu. Jussu Christianissimi Regis, ad Usum Serenissimi Delphini. For Ruæus—Charles De La Rue—see Chalmers's Biog. Dict. xxvi. 454. According to Lowndes, Bibl. Man. , ed. 1871, p. 2776, the first English edition of the Delphine Virgil was published in 1686. It was frequently reprinted. W. Johnston the bookseller, in his examination before the Committee of the House of Commons ( ante , p. 275, n. 1), ‘being asked, whether he did not claim a copyright in some of the editions of the classics In Usum Delphini , said, No such right was ever claimed, so as to exclude any other person who chose to print them; that he had purchased the right of printing in part some of those classics, but never supposed that right protected by any law, nor considered it in any other manner than as the purchase of an honorary right, which he explained to be a maxim held by the trade not to reprint upon the first proprietor.’ Parl. Hist. xvii. 1079. By ‘a single line in Virgil's hand’ c. Hume clearly means in his handwriting.

Note 5. Sketches of the History of Man. Johnson criticised some statements in it. See Boswell's Johnson , iii. 340, 351.

Note 6. ‘ Johnson. “The Scotchman has taken the right method in his Elements of Criticism. I do not mean that he has taught us anything; but he has told us old things in a new way.” M URPHY. “He seems to have read a great deal of French criticism, and wants to make it his own; as if he had been for years anatomising the heart of man, and peeping into every cranny of it.” G OLDSMITH. “It is easier to write that book than to read it.”’ Boswell's Johnson , ii. 89. At an earlier time Johnson had said of it:—‘Sir, this book is a pretty essay, and deserves to be held in some estimation, though much of it is chimerical.’ Ib. i. 393. George Wallace told Boswell that when Charles Townshend read it, he said:—‘This is the work of a dull man grown whimsical.’ Boswelliana , p. 278.

Lord Cockburn in his Memorials , p. 117, describes Kames as ‘art indefatigable and speculative, but coarse man. When he tried Matthew Hay, with whom he used to play at chess, for murder, he exclaimed, when the verdict of guilty was returned, “That's checkmate to you, Matthew.”’ According to Ramsay of Ochtertyre, ‘Lord Elibank, Lord Kames, and Mr. David Hume were considered as a literary triumvirate, from whose judgment, in matters of taste and composition, there lay no appeal.’ Scotland and Scotsmen , i. 319.

Note 7. The Sketches sold too well for any loss to be incurred. They passed through several editions.

Note 8. The success not only of himself and Robertson, but of such authors as Blair, Sir John Dalrymple, John Home, Adam Ferguson, and Macpherson, seems to have made Hume think that there was scarcely any limit set to the price that ‘the factious barbarians’ of the South would pay an author, if only he had the good luck to be born north of the Tweed, and had taken the trouble to ‘unscottify’ his diction.

Note 1. It is strange that Strahan makes no mention of Goldsmith's death, which had taken place five days earlier. I cannot find any mention of Goldsmith by Hume.

Note 2. Characteristics of the Present Political State of Great Britain. London, 1758. Gent. Mag. 1758, p. 135.

Note 3. By ‘copies’ Strahan means ‘the copyright of books still in manuscript.’ See ante , p. 266, n. 5, for the £2000 paid to Sir John Dalrymple for his Memoirs. Compared with this the £3400 paid to Robertson for his Charles V seems moderate ( ante , p. 14, n. 1).

Note 4. Strahan's logic is at fault. It is no exception to the rule laid down by Wallace to show that a work for which much was given produced little. All that he asserted was, that a great gain can only be made by a great outlay. He did not maintain that every great outlay will produce a great gain.

Note 5. Malone says that ‘Hawkesworth was introduced by Garrick to Lord Sandwich [the First Lord of the Admiralty], who, thinking to put a few hundred pounds into his pocket, appointed him to revise and publish Cook's Voyages. He scarcely did anything to the MS., yet sold it to Cadell and Strahan for £6000.’ Prior's Life of Malone , p. 441. It had been published the year before in 3 vols. quarto, at a price of three guineas. Gent. Mag. 1773, p. 286. Thurlow, in speaking against the Copyright Bill on March 24, 1774, said ‘that Hawkesworth's book, which was a mere composition of trash, sold for three guineas by the booksellers’ monopolizing.’ Parl. Hist. xvii. p. 1086. Charles Darwin for the first edition of his Naturalist's Voyage round the World ‘received payment only in the form of a large number of presentation copies; he seems to have been glad to sell the copyright of the second edition to Mr. Murray for £150.’ Life of Darwin , ed. 1887, i. 337.

Note 6. Gavin Hamilton, the Edinburgh bookseller, in his letter about the first volume of Hume's History , says:—‘The book will sell at fifteen shillings bound, or ten shillings to booksellers in sheets.’ In a calculation which he makes he reduces the ten shillings to nine, and then says that there will remain £400 profit to the author and £200 to the publisher. Ante , p. 3. At this same rate a book sold bound at a guinea would produce £560 profit to the author and £280 to the publisher. The calculations therefore of Hamilton and Strahan do not differ much. See Boswell's Johnson , ii. 424, for an interesting letter by Johnson on the book-trade.

Note 7. Lord Cockburn in his Memorials , pp. 108, 169, describes ‘the famous shop of William Creech, the bookseller. Its position in the very tideway of all our business made it the natural resort of lawyers, authors, and all sorts of literary idlers, who were always buzzing about the convenient hive. All who wished to see a poet or a stranger, or to hear the public news, the last joke by Erskine, or yesterday's occurrence in the Parliament-House, or to get the publication of the day or newspapers—all congregated there; lawyers, doctors, clergymen, and authors.’

Burns celebrated him in Verses written at Selkirk. In the last stanza but one he says:—

• ‘May I be slander's common speech;
• A text for infamy to preach;
• And lastly streekit out to bleach
• In winter snaw;
• When I forget thee! Willie Creech,
• Tho’ far awa.’

Note 8. Johnson defines neat in its third meaning as ‘ pure, unadulterated, unmingled : in the cant of trade.’ The only instance he gives of its use is as applied to liquors. He does not give the word under its modern spelling, net.

Note 9. George Wallace, writing to Strahan on Sept. 23 of this year, says:—‘I have caused a skilful person to make an accurate computation to assist me in judging of the value of the book.... Probably it will swell to 500 pages, and might be decently sold to gentlemen at a guinea. By the computation each copy costs 3 s. 3 d. prime, and if sold to the trade at 15 s. , an impression consisting of 1000 copies would fetch £580 of profit or thereby, of which I am told I ought to get about £400. The deuce is in it, if after Kaims's Elements have come to a fifth edition, three have sold of Ferguson's Society , and three of Macpherson's History , one shall not sell of this Treatise.’ Barker MSS.

Note 10. ‘We talked of the uncertainty of profit with which authors and booksellers engage in the publication of literary works. J OHNSON. “My judgment I have found is no certain rule as to the sale of a book.”’ Boswell's Johnson , iv. 121.

Note 11. Dr. Robertson must have written his ‘sentiments’ soon after; for Mr. Mansfield at the bar of the House of Commons and Lord Lyttelton in the House of Lords each said that he had a letter from him. Parl. Hist. xvii. 1098, 1400.

Note 12. By such ‘a company of booksellers’—eight in number—was Johnson's Dictionary published. Boswell's Johnson , i. 183. It was a company ‘of about forty of the most respectable booksellers in London’ who undertook the publication of the Lives of the Poets. Ib. iii. 111.

Note 13. I do not know where Hume lays down this general rule. It is the very opposite of Johnson's, that ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.’ Boswell's Johnson , iii. 19.

Note 1. This interruption had lasted for more than a year and a half. When Hume resumed it he was already some way advanced in an illness which at first, he says, gave him no alarm, but which in ten months more was to carry him off.

Note 2. Strahan had been elected for Malmesbury in the Parliament that met on Nov. 29, 1774. Parl. Hist. xviii. 24. One cause of the interruption of the correspondence might have been want of time on his side. In one of his earlier letters he said:—‘I have borrowed two hours from my pillow to write to you.’ M. S. R. S. E.

Note 3. Hume, in writing from Paris on June 22, 1764, mentions a Dr. Trail as ‘our chaplain’—chaplain to the Embassy, that is to say. Burton's Hume , ii. 204. Horace Walpole mentions the same clergyman in a letter to Conway on Jan. 22, 1756. ‘Your brother [Lord Hertford] has got a sixth infanta; at the christening t’other night Mr. Trail had got through two prayers before anybody found out that the child was not brought down stairs.’ Letters , ii. 499.

Note 4. Dugald Stewart, in his Life of Thomas Reid (ed. 1811, p. 426), speaking of the appointment of that philosopher to the chair at Glasgow University vacated by Adam Smith, says:—‘The Wilsons (both father and son) were formed to attach his heart by the similarity of their scientific pursuits, and an entire sympathy with his views and sentiments.’ In a note (p. 528) Stewart adds:—‘Alexander Wilson, M.D., and Patrick Wilson were well known over Europe by their observations on the Solar Spots.’

Note 5. Dr. A. Carlyle, writing of Dr. Wight's appointment in 1762 to the chair of Church History at Glasgow, says:—‘As he was my near relation, his advancement, in which I had a chief hand, was very pleasing; and as he was the most agreeable of all men, his coming near me promised much enjoyment.’ Carlyle's Auto. p. 424. See Ib. p. 395.

Note 6. ‘Hume took much to the company of the younger clergy, not from a wish to bring them over to his opinions, for he never attempted to overturn any man's principles, but they best understood his notions, and could furnish him with literary conversation. Robertson and John Home and Bannatine and I lived all in the country, and came only periodically to the town. Blair and Jardine both lived in it, and suppers being the only fashionable meal at that time, we dined where we best could, and by cadies [errand boys] assembled our friends to meet us in a tavern by nine o’clock; and a fine time it was when we could collect David Hume, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Lord Elibank, and Drs. Blair and Jardine, on an hour's warning. I remember one night that David Hume came rather late to us, and directly pulled a large key from his pocket, which he laid on the table. This, he said, was given him by his maid Peggy (much more like a man than a woman) that she might not sit up for him, for she said, when the honest fellows came in from the country, he never returned home till after one o’clock. This intimacy of the young clergy with David Hume enraged the zealots on the opposite side, who little knew how impossible it was for him, had he been willing, to shake their principles.’ Carlyle's Auto. p. 274.

Note 7. Hume wrote to his friend, Dr. Clephane, on Sept. 3, 1757:—‘I am charmed to find you so punctual a correspondent. I always knew you to be a good friend, though I was afraid that I had lost you, and that you had joined that great multitude who abused me, and reproached me with Paganism, and Jacobitism, and many other wretched isms , of which I am only guilty of a part.’ Burton's Hume , ii. 38.

Note 8. Dr. Traill was unlike the Professor under whom Dr. A. Carlyle studied at Edinburgh; of whom he writes:—‘There was one advantage attending the lectures of a dull professor—viz., that he could form no school, and the students were left entirely to themselves, and naturally formed opinions far more liberal than those they got from the Professor. This was the answer I gave to Patrick, Lord Elibank, when he asked me one day, many years afterwards, what could be the reason that the young clergymen of that period so far surpassed their predecessors of his early days in useful accomplishments and liberality of mind—viz., that the Professor of Theology was dull, and Dutch, and prolix.’ Carlyle's Auto. p. 56.

Note 9. Parliament had met on Oct. 26. Horace Walpole wrote on Nov. 14:—‘The Parliament grants whatever is asked; and yet a great alteration has happened in the Administration. The Duke of Grafton has changed sides, and was turned out last Friday.’ After mentioning other changes he continues:—‘The town is impatient to see whether this change of men implies any change of measures. I do not see why it should, for none of the new Ministers have ever inclined to the Americans.’ Letters , vi. 280. There was no yielding in the King, who on Oct. 15 had written to Lord North:—‘Every means of distressing America must meet with my concurrence, as it tends to bringing them to feel the necessity of returning to their duty.’ Corres. of George III with Lord North , i. 274.

Note 10. Hume is speaking of the trade in English manufactures only. The elder Pitt, on Jan. 14, 1766, said:—‘I will be bold to affirm, that the profits to Great Britain from the trade of the Colonies through all its branches is two millions a year. This is the fund that carried you triumphantly through the last war. The estates that were rented at £2000 a year threescore years ago are at £3000 at present. Those estates sold then for from fifteen to eighteen years’ purchase; the same may be now sold for thirty. You owe this to America.’ Parl. Hist. xvi. 105. A writer in the Gent. Mag. for 1768, p. 514, who signs himself F. B. (Benjamin Franklin, I suspect), gives the declared exports from England, exclusive of Scotland and Ireland, to America as £2,072,000 a year, and the imports as £1,081,000. He considers however that the exports really amounted to £3,000,000. It was the object of the writer to make these as large as possible. (In 1886 the exports from the United Kingdom amounted to £37,600,000, and the imports to £81,600,000. Whitaker's Almanac , p. 517.)

Great Britain, among other restrictions, would not allow the Americans to erect steel furnaces, or to export from one province to another, whether by land or by water, hats or woollen goods of their own make. She assumed to herself the exclusive right of supplying them with all goods from Europe. Smith's Wealth of Nations , ed. 1811, ii. 424, 426. Sir John Pringle, in a postcript to a letter to Hume, dated London, July 8, 1775, told him that a sensible man from the Colonies had complained of the trouble the Americans were put to in being forced ‘at all times (even in time of war) to come with their cargo of wine taken up in Spain or Portugal to the Isle of Wight, or other English ports, unload it and put it again on board, before they could carry it home. The porters at such places could only gain while the Provincials were unnecessarily the sufferers.’ Sir John had written at the bottom of his letter:—‘Burn the enclosed P.S.’ M. S. R. S. E. Adam Smith condemns such a system as this in the following words:—‘To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is however a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers. Such statesmen, and such statesmen only, are capable of fancying that they will find some advantage in employing the blood and treasure of their fellow-citizens to found and maintain such an empire.’ Wealth of Nations , ii. 471.

Note 11. ‘We most carefully distinguish between the effects of the colony trade and those of the monopoly of that trade. The former are always and necessarily beneficial; the latter always and necessarily hurtful.... If the colony trade ... is advantageous to Great Britain, it is not by means of the monopoly, but in spite of the monopoly.’ Wealth of Nations , ed. 1811, ii. 462, 464. Mr. E. J. Payne in his History of European Colonies , p. 127, says:—‘The immediate effect of the independence of America was felt in its destroying the Navigation Act, and opening the commerce of the United States to the world. The shipping of the United States increased fivefold in twenty years; the trade with England increased in the same proportion.’

Note 12. Burke, on March 22 of this year, in his speech on Conciliation with America, had said:—‘Three thousand miles of ocean lie between you and them. No contrivance can prevent the effect of this distance in weakening Government. Seas roll, and months pass, between the order and the execution; and the want of a speedy explanation of a single point is enough to defeat a whole system. You have, indeed, winged ministers of vengeance , who carry your bolts in their pounces to the remotest verge of the sea. But there a power steps in, that limits the arrogance of raging passions and furious elements, and says, “ So far shalt thou go, and no farther. ” Who are you, that you should fret and rage, and bite the chains of Nature? Nothing worse happens to you than does to all nations who have extensive Empire; and it happens in all the forms into which Empire can be thrown.’ Payne's Burke , i. 183.

Note 13. The Charter Governments were Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The charter of Massachusetts, which had been adjudged to be forfeited in 1684, was restored by William III with its privileges greatly maimed. Bancroft's History of the United States , ed. 1860, ii. 127; iii. 80. New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, North and South Carolina, Georgia and Virginia were Royal Colonies. Maryland and Pennsylvania with Delaware were Proprietary Governments. Encyclo. Britan. , ninth ed. xxiii. 730. ‘The Charter Colonies in which the Governors were chosen annually by popular election, and the Proprietary Governments had no dependence on the executive government of England, and they transacted their business with it through agents of their own, resident in England.’ Payne's European Colonies , p. 106. In Massachusetts however, after 1684, the Governor was appointed by the King. Bancroft's History , iii. 80.