[Q] At a subsequent period, after the king had granted him a pension, he received two offers of church preferment in England—the one from Mr. Pitt, of Dorsetshire, of a living in that county worth £150 per annum, the other from Dr. Thomas, Bishop of Winchester, of a living in Hants, valued at £500 a year—neither of which he would accept. In the letter wherein he declines the second noble offer, he thus expresses himself:
"I wrote the 'Essays on Truth' with the certain prospect of raising many enemies, with very faint hopes of attracting the public attention, and without any views of advancing my fortune. I published it, however, because I thought it might probably do a little good, by bringing to nought, or, at least, lessening the reputation of that wretched system of sceptical philosophy, which had made a most alarming progress, and done incredible mischief to this country. My enemies have been at great pains to represent my views, in that publication, as very different: and that my principal, or only motive was to make a book, and, if possible, to raise myself higher in the world. So that, if I were now to accept preferment in the church, I should be apprehensive that I might strengthen the hands of the gainsayer, and give the world some ground to believe that my love of truth was not quite so ardent, or so pure, as I had pretended.
"Besides, might it not have the appearance of levity and insincerity, and, by some, be construed into a want of principle, if I were, at these years (for I am now thirty-eight), to make such an important change in my way of life, and to quit, with no other apparent motive than that of bettering my circumstances, that church of which I have hitherto been a member? If my book has any tendency to do good, as I flatter myself it has, I would not, for the wealth of the Indies, do any thing to counteract that tendency; and I am afraid that tendency might, in some measure be counteracted (at least in this country) if I were to give the adversary the least ground to charge me with inconsistency. It is true, that the force of my reasonings cannot be really affected by my character; truth is truth, whoever be the speaker; but even truth itself becomes less respectable, when spoken, or supposed to be spoken, by insincere lips.
"It has also been hinted to me, by several persons of very sound judgment, that what I have written, or may hereafter write in favour of religion, has a chance of being more attended to, if I continue a layman, than if I were to become a clergyman. Nor am I without apprehensions (though some of my friends think them ill founded) that, from entering so late in life, and from so remote a province, into the Church of England, some degree of ungracefulness, particularly in pronunciation, might adhere to my performances in public, sufficient to render them less pleasing, and consequently less useful."
[R] So Beattie names the figures in one of his letters; but Sir William Forbes tells us they are supposed to mean Sophistry, Scepticism, and Infidelity. The worthy Baronet proceeds to observe:
"Because one of these was a lean figure and the [an] other a fat one, people of lively imaginations pleased themselves with finding in them the portraits of Voltaire and Mr. Hume. But Sir Joshua, I have reason to believe, had no such thought when he painted those figures."
Surely Sir William had never read all the letters which he printed in his Life of Beattie, for in vol. ii. p. 42, octavo ed., we find the great painter writing to our poet as follows, in February, 1774:
"Mr. Hume has heard from somebody that he is introduced in the picture, not much to his credit; there is only a figure, covering his face with his hands, which they may call Hume or any body else; it is true it has a tolerable broad back. As for Voltaire, I intended he should be one of the group."
This fine picture is now at Aberdeen, in the possession of Beattie's niece, Mrs. Glennie.
[S] When Beattie was in London, in 1773, and when it was doubtful whether government would ever make any provision for him, his friends there set on foot a subscription for this work. "It was a thing," says he, in a letter to Lady Mayne, January, 1774, "of a private nature entirely; projected not by me, but by some of my friends, who had condescended to charge themselves with the whole trouble of it: it was never meant to be made public, nor put into the hands of booksellers, nor carried on by solicitation, but was to be considered as a voluntary mark of the approbation of some persons of rank and fortune, who wished it to be known that they patronized me on account of what I had written in defence of truth," &c. Prefixed to the volume is a list of nearly five hundred subscribers, among whom are many distinguished characters in church and state.