[220] Williams (d. 1816), who published 3 vols. of “Lectures on Education” and other works, has a longer claim on remembrance as the founder of the “Literary Fund.” [↑]
[221] The subject is discussed at length in the essay on Gibbon in the author’s Pioneer Humanists. [↑]
[222] Cp. Bishop Watson’s Apology for Christianity (1776) as to the vogue of unbelief at that date. (Two Apologies, ed. 1806, p. 121. Cp. pp. 179, 399.) [↑]
[223] The panegyric on Voltaire delivered at his death by Frederick the Great (Nov. 26, 1778) was promptly translated into English (1779). [↑]
[224] Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790, p. 131. [↑]
[225] See Hannah More’s letter of April, 1777, in her Life, abridged 16mo-ed. p. 36. An edition of Shaftesbury, apparently, appeared in 1773, and another in 1790. [↑]
[226] The essays of Hume, including the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779), were now circulated in repeated editions. Mr. Rae, in his valuable Life of Adam Smith, p. 311, cites a German observer, Wendeborn, as writing in 1785 that the Dialogues, though a good deal discussed in Germany, had made no sensation in England, and were at that date entirely forgotten. But a second edition had been called for in 1779, and they were added to a fresh edition of the essays in 1788. Any “forgetting” is to be set down to preoccupation with other interests. [↑]
[227] Letter to the Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, 1777, p. 3. [↑]
[228] Dr. Parr, Characters of C. J. Fox, i, 220; cited in Charles James Fox, a Commentary, by W. S. Landor, ed. by S. Wheeler, 1907, p. 147. Fox’s secretary and biographer, Trotter, while anxious to discredit the statement of Parr, gives such a qualified account (Memoirs of the Latter Years of C. J. Fox, 1811, pp. 470–71) of Fox’s views on immortality as to throw much doubt on the stronger testimony of B. C. Walpole (Recollections of C. J. Fox, 1806, p. 242). [↑]
[229] See J. L. Le B. Hammond, Charles James Fox, 1903, ch. xiii. [↑]