Two days afterwards Hume died, and was buried in Calton Cemetery. Smith did not like the round tower erected under a provision of the will to mark the grave—“it is the greatest piece of vanity I ever saw in my friend Hume.” By the will a legacy of £200 and copies of all Hume’s published works were left to him; but he stoutly refused to accept the money, as he had ceased to be executor, although he had no thought of relinquishing his promise to edit Hume’s life and works. “I have added,” he wrote to Hume’s brother (Kirkcaldy, October 7th), “at the bottom of my will the note discharging the legacy of £200 which your brother was so kind as to leave me. Upon the most mature deliberation I am fully satisfied that in justice it is not due to me. Tho’ it should be due to me therefore in strict law, I cannot with honour accept of it.”
A month earlier he had written to Strahan from Dalkeith, where he was staying with the Duke of Buccleuch, a careful explanation of Hume’s will and last wishes. “Both from his will and from his conversation I understand that there are only two [manuscripts] which he meant should be published—an account of his life, and Dialogues concerning Natural Religion. The latter, tho’ finely written, I could have wished had remained in manuscript to be communicated only to a few friends. I propose to add to his Life a very well authenticated account of his behaviour during his last illness.”
Smith’s addition to Hume’s autobiography took the form of a letter to Strahan giving an account of Hume’s last illness, concluding with the words: “Upon the whole, I have always considered him both in his lifetime and since his death as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit.” This warm-hearted and eloquent, but surely extravagant eulogy of the “virtuous heathen,” created precisely the kind of popular clamour that Smith had been so anxious to avoid. Strahan liked the addition exceedingly; but as this and the autobiography together were too short to make even a tiny volume, he wrote back, good publisher that he was:—
“I have been advised by some very good judges to annex some of his letters to me on political subjects. What think you of this? I will do nothing without your advice and approbation, nor would I for the world publish any letter of his but such as in your opinion would do him honour. Mr. Gibbon thinks such as I have shown him would have that tendency. Now if you approve of this in any manner, you may perhaps add partly to the collection from your own cabinet and those of Mr. John Home, Dr. Robertson, and others of your mutual friends which you may pick up before you return hither. But if you wholly disapprove of this scheme, say nothing of it, here let it drop, for without your concurrence I will not publish a single word of it.”
A decisive reply came at once from Kirkcaldy. It gives a peremptory judgment—quite against the drift of modern opinion—upon what will always be a case for the casuist:—
“I am sensible that many of Mr. Hume’s letters would do him great honour, and that you would publish none but such as would. But what in this case ought principally to be considered is the will of the Dead. Mr. Hume’s constant injunction was to burn all his Papers except the Dialogues and the account of his own life. This injunction was even inserted in the body of his will. I know he always disliked the thought of his letters ever being published. He had been in long and intimate correspondence with a relation of his own who dyed a few years ago. When that gentleman’s health began to decline he was extremely anxious to get back his letters, least the heir should think of publishing them. They were accordingly returned, and burnt as soon as returned. If a collection of Mr. Hume’s letters besides was to receive the public approbation, as yours certainly would, the Curls of the times would immediately set about rummaging the cabinets of all those who had ever received a scrap of paper from him. Many things would be published not fit to see the light, to the great mortification of all those who wish well to his memory. Nothing has contributed so much to sink the value of Swift’s works as the undistinguished publication of his letters; and be assured that your publication, however select, would soon be followed by an undistinguished one. I should therefore be sorry to see any beginning given to the publication of his letters. His life will not make a volume, but it will make a small pamphlet.”
The nervous objection felt by Hume and Smith to the publication of correspondence or of any manuscript not carefully considered by the writer, and intended by him for publication, may be overstrained; but perhaps this generation errs as much in its anxiety to penetrate the privacy of the dead as they did in wishing to destroy everything that was incomplete, or too easy, intimate, and negligent—as they thought—for the eye of a critical posterity.
Fortune now played our provident philosopher one of her most insolent tricks. When the dreaded Dialogues appeared, they fell perfectly flat; but the letter to Strahan excited, as Mr. Rae says, “a long reverberation of angry criticism.” His words, few and simple, but warm with the glow of friendship, “rang like a challenge to religion itself.” Pamphlets poured forth, the cleverest of which, “A Letter to Adam Smith, LL.D., on the Life, Death, and Philosophy of David Hume, Esquire, by one of the People called Christians,” was still being printed and circulated for edification by the Religious Tract Society in the thirtieth year of the nineteenth century. Its anonymous author, Dr. George Horne, President of Magdalen College, Oxford, proclaimed that no unbeliever could be virtuous or charitable, and charged Smith as well as Hume with the atrocious wickedness of diffusing atheism through the land. “You would persuade us,” he cried, “by the example of David Hume, Esq., that atheism is the only cordial for low spirits and the proper antidote against the fear of death; but surely he who can reflect with complacency on a friend thus employing his talents in this life, and thus amusing himself with Lucian, whist, and Charon at his death, can smile over Babylon in ruins, esteem the earthquakes which destroyed Lisbon as agreeable occurrences, and congratulate the hardened Pharaoh on his overthrow in the Red Sea.”
Smith made no answer to this attack, for which the author was afterwards rewarded by a Bishopric. After Christmas, when his mother’s health allowed him to leave her, he travelled to London, and early in January 1777 he had taken lodgings in Suffolk Street, near the British Coffee House, and was busy preparing his second edition of the Wealth of Nations, a reprint, with corrections and two additional pages. In March he was at a dinner of the Literary Club with Gibbon, Garrick, Reynolds, Johnson, Burke, and Fox. Mr. Rae thinks he remained most of the year in London, and probably he had some intercourse with Lord North and other members of the Government. At any rate Lord North, who had studied Smith’s chapters on taxation to more purpose than his chapters on expenditure and policy, borrowed two of his ideas in the Budget of 1777—for he laid taxes on men-servants and on property sold by auction.[39] Smith was back in Edinburgh by the end of this year, and there heard from Strahan that he had been appointed by Lord North one of the Commissioners of the Customs in Scotland. In the middle of January he writes from Kirkcaldy to Strahan, requesting him to send two copies of the second edition of the Wealth of Nations, “handsomely bound and gilt, one to Lord North, the other to Sir Gray Cooper,” and adds, “I believe that I have been very highly obliged to him [Cooper] in this business.”[40] The Commissionership was worth £600 a year, and Smith at once proposed to relinquish his pension; but the Duke of Buccleuch would not hear of it.
Early in 1778 Smith removed to Edinburgh. He was now in the enjoyment of a certain income of £900 a year apart from the considerable sums which he derived from the sale of his books. He took Panmure House in the Canongate, not far from the deserted palace of Holyrood—a fashionable quarter where some of the Scottish nobility, forsaken by King and Court, still kept their town houses. Panmure House is now a dismantled store; and it needs some imagination to realise how Windham, accustomed to London palaces, should have called it “magnificent,” as he looked from its newly painted windows and plastered walls “over the long strip of terraced garden on to the soft green slopes of the Calton.”[41]