Note 702 — Chapter V

What Sir James Mackintosh says of him is only a faint echo of the general voice of his contemporaries. ‘His temper was calm, not to say cold; but though none of his feelings were ardent, all were engaged on the side of virtue. He was free from the slightest tincture of malignity or meanness; his conduct was uniformly excellent.’ Mackintosh's Memoirs, vol. ii. p. 162. A greater than Mackintosh, and a man who knew Hume intimately, expresses himself in much warmer terms. ‘Upon the whole,’ writes Adam Smith,—‘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.’ Hume's Philosophical Works, vol. i. p. xxv. Some notices of Hume will be found in an interesting work just published. Autobiography of Alexander Carlyle, Edinburgh, 1860, pp. 272–278. But Carlyle, though a man of considerable practical skill, was incapable of large views, and was, therefore, unable, I will not say to measure, but even to conceive, the size of such an understanding as that possessed by David Hume. Of his want of speculative power, a decisive instance appears in his remarks on Adam Smith. He gravely says (Autobiography, p. 281), ‘Smith's fine writing is chiefly displayed in his book on Moral Sentiments, which is the pleasantest and most eloquent book on the subject. His Wealth of Nations, from which he was judged to be an inventive genius of the first order, is tedious and full of repetition. His separate essays in the second volume have the air of being occasional pamphlets, without much force or determination. On political subjects, his opinions were not very sound.’ It is rather too much when a village-preacher writes in this strain of the greatest man his country has ever produced.