[399:1] From the original at Kilravock.
[399:2] Edinburgh: published by Hamilton, Balfour, and Neill. It is entered in the Gentleman's Magazine list for October.
[401:1] Carte's last volume was posthumously published in the year after Hume's first.
[403:1] He does not appear to have suffered any persecutions before he wrote the first volume of the History of the Stuarts, unless the opposition to his appointment as a professor deserves that name. The tone of the History itself was indeed one of the grounds on which he was attacked in the ecclesiastical courts.
[403:2] Article by Lord Jeffrey in The Edinburgh Review, xii. 276.
[405:1] Article on History by Mr. Macaulay. Edinburgh Review, xlvii. p. 359.
[407:1] Printed in the Appendix of Voltaire et Rousseau, par Henry Lord Brougham, p. 340.
[408:1] See the [letters] in Appendix. The French bibliographical works of reference, which are in general very full, do not mention any translation of the History of the Stuarts earlier than 1760, when Querard and Brunet give the following:
Histoire de la Maison de Stuart sur le trône d'Angleterre, jusqu'au détrônement de Jacques II. traduite de l'Anglois de David Hume, (par L'Abbé Prévost.) Londres (Paris) 1760. 3 vols. in 4to.
The edition about to appear in Holland, which threw Le Blanc into despair, seems to have been overlooked. This Prévost, or Prévôt, is the well-known author of the "Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut," which still holds its place in French popular literature, though it bears but a small proportion to the bulk of his other voluminous works which are forgotten. The authors of the Dictionnaire Historique, say they find in his translation of Hume, "un air étranger, un style souvent embarrassé, sémé d'Anglicismes, d'expressions peu Françoises, de tours durs, de phrases louches et mal construites." This abbé led an irregular life, being a sort of disgraced ecclesiastic, and his death was singularly tragical. He had fallen by the side of a wood in a fit of apoplexy. Being found insensible, he was removed as a dead body to the residence of a magistrate, where a surgeon was to open the body to discover the cause of death. At the first insertion of the knife, a scream from the victim terrified all present: but it was too late; the instrument had entered a vital part.