“The Duke of Buccleuch tells me that you are very zealous in American affairs. My notion is that the matter is not so important as is commonly imagined. If I be mistaken, I shall probably correct my error when I see you or read you. Our navigation and general commerce may suffer more than our manufactures. Should London fall as much in its size as I have done, it will be the better. It is nothing but a hulk of bad and unclean humours.”
At last the book appears, and Hume writes his friend, April 1st, 1776:— {p-xiii}
“I am much pleased with your performance; and the perusal of it has taken me from a state of great anxiety. It was a work of so much expectation by yourself, by your friends, and by the public, that I trembled for its first appearance, but am now much relieved. Not but that the reading of it necessarily requires so much attention, and the public is disposed to give so little, that I shall still doubt for some time of its being at first very popular. But it has depth and solidity and acuteness, and is so much illustrated by curious facts that it must at last take the public attention. It is probably much improved by your last abode in London. If you were here at my fireside, I should dispute some of your principles. I cannot think that the rent of farms makes any part of the price of produce,[6] but that the price is determined altogether by the quantity and the demand. . . . But these and a hundred other points are fit only to be discussed in conversation.”
Hume, though he “took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women, and had no reason to be displeased with the reception he met with from them,” died unmarried. Adam Smith also died unmarried, “though he was for several years,” according to Dugald Stewart, “attached to a young lady of great beauty and accomplishment.” Hume, in the Essay “Of the Study of History,” speaks of being desired once by “a young beauty for whom I had some passion to send her some novels and romances for her amusement.” David was a “canny” man though. In these circumstances the following playful sally in a letter from Hume to Mrs. Dysart, of Eccles, a relative, may have interest:—“What arithmetic will serve to fix the proportion between good and bad wives, and rate the different classes of each? Sir Isaac Newton himself, {p-xiv} who could measure the course of the planets and weigh the earth as in a pair of scales—even he had not algebra enough to reduce that amiable part of our species to a just equation; and they are the only heavenly bodies whose orbits are as yet uncertain.”
The foregoing are mere glimpses of this truly great man, and are offered with a view to awakening and stimulating amongst general readers a desire for first-hand knowledge of David Hume.
W. B. R.
May 1906.
MY OWN LIFE.
It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore, I shall be short. It may be thought an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life; but this narrative shall contain little more than the History of my Writings; as, indeed, almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations. The first success of most of my writings was not such as to be an object of vanity.
I was born the 26th of April 1711, old style, at Edinburgh. I was of a good family, both by father and mother. My father’s family is a branch of the Earl of Home’s or Hume’s; and my ancestors had been proprietors of the estate, which my brother possesses, for several generations. My mother was daughter of Sir David Falconer, President of the College of Justice; the title of Halkerton came by succession to her brother.