Volume 2 — CHAPTER X. (continued 2)

Mr. Wilson told me of his machines, which seem very ingenious, and deserve much encouragement. I shall soon see them.

I am very well acquainted with Bourke, who was much taken with your book. He got your direction from me, with a view of writing to you, and thanking you for your present; for I made it pass in your name. I wonder he has not done it: he is now in Ireland. I am not acquainted with Jenyns; but he spoke very highly of the book to Oswald, who is his brother in the board of trade. Millar showed me, a few days ago, a letter from Lord Fitzmaurice; where he tells him, that he has carried over a few copies to the Hague, for presents. Mr. York was very much taken with it, as well as several others who had read it.

I am told that you are preparing a new edition, and propose to make some additions and alterations, in order to obviate objections. I shall use the freedom to propose one; which, if it appears to be of any weight, you may have in your eye. I wish you had more particularly and fully proved that all kinds of sympathy are necessarily agreeable. This is the hinge of your system, and yet you only mention the matter cursorily, in p. 20. Now, it would appear that there is a disagreeable sympathy, as well as an agreeable. And, indeed, as the sympathetic passion is a reflex image of the principal, it must partake of its qualities, and be painful where that is so. Indeed, when we converse with a man with whom we can entirely sympathize, that is, where there is a warm and intimate friendship, the cordial openness of such a commerce overpowers the pain of a disagreeable sympathy, and renders the whole movement agreeable. But, in ordinary cases, this cannot have place. An ill-humoured fellow; a man tired and disgusted with every thing, always ennuié, sickly, complaining, embarrassed; such a one throws an evident damp on company, which I suppose would be accounted for by sympathy, and yet is disagreeable.

It is always thought a difficult problem to account for the pleasure received from the tears, and grief, and sympathy of tragedy, which would not be the case if all sympathy was agreeable. An hospital would be a more entertaining place than a ball. I am afraid that, in p. 99, and 111, this proposition has escaped you, or, rather, is interwoven with your reasonings in that place. You say expressly, "It is painful to go along with grief, and we always enter into it with reluctance." It will probably be requisite for you to modify or explain this sentiment, and reconcile it to your system.

My dear Mr. Smith, you must not be so much engrossed with your own book as never to mention mine. The Whigs, I am told, are anew in a rage against me, though they know not how to vent themselves; for they are constrained to allow all my facts. You have, probably, seen Hurd's abuse of me. He is of the Warburtonian school; and, consequently, very insolent and very scurrilous; but I shall never reply a word to him. If my past writings do not sufficiently prove me to be no Jacobite, ten volumes in folio never would.

I signed, yesterday, an agreement with Mr. Millar; where I mention that I proposed to write the History of England, from the beginning till the accession of Henry VII.; and he engages to give me £1400 for the copy. This is the first previous agreement ever I made with a bookseller.[61:1] I shall execute this work at leisure, without fatiguing myself by such ardent application as I have hitherto employed. It is chiefly as a resource against idleness that I shall undertake this work; for, as to money, I have enough; and as to reputation, what I have wrote already will be sufficient, if it be good; if not, it is not likely I shall now write better. I found it impracticable (at least fancied so) to write the History since the Revolution. I am in doubt whether I shall stay here and execute the work; or return to Scotland, and only come up here to consult the manuscripts. I have several inducements on both sides. Scotland suits my fortune best, and is the seat of my principal friendships; but it is too narrow a place for me; and it mortifies me that I sometimes hurt my friends. Pray write me your judgment soon. Are the bigots much in arms on account of this last volume? Robertson's book has great merit; but it was visible that he profited here by the animosity against me. I suppose the case was the same with you. I am, dear Smith, yours sincerely.[61:2]

In 1758 and 1759, much alarm was caused throughout Britain by a threatened invasion from France. Hume seems to have "improved" this state of matters, in the following letters, imparting wild and exaggerated news. His writing in such a tone, at such a juncture, is an example of his entertaining the same contempt for panics as for popular feeling in other forms. There is no address on the first of the letters. The second would reach its destination nearly at the same time with the account of Rodney's destruction of the flat-bottomed boats intended for the invasion.

"15th May, [1759.]

"Dear Sir,—If you pass by Edinburgh, please bring me two pounds of rapee, such as Peggy Elliot uses to take. You will get it at Gillespy's near the Cross.

"Mrs. Mallet has her compliments to you, and begs you to procure her a collection of Scotch pebbles. I assured her that I should inform you of her desire, and also that you would not fail to execute it.

"We hear that you are to be expelled the university with disgrace. Even the most partial of your friends here are obliged to allow that you deserve it.

"We expect over forty thousand French, with the first fair wind. They will probably settle the ministry; for, at present, the Pitts and the Legges, and the Grenvilles, are all going by the ears.

"We live in hopes of seeing you soon. My compliments to Smith, whose book is in a very good way.

"Dr. Warburton presents his compliments to you. Yours sincerely," &c.[62:1]

Hume to Mr. Ruat.[62:2]

"6th July [1739.]

"Dear Ruat,—I am very much obliged to you for the desire you express to Miss Elliot of hearing from me; and particularly your wishing to be informed, by me, of any news that pass. As soon as I knew, certainly, how to direct to you, I have sat down to write; and, though the occurrences are no way extraordinary which I can communicate, they shall all be strictly, and literally, and certainly true; and you may venture to tell them as such to all the idle people that frequent Buxton.

"This morning, there arrived an express from Admiral Hawke's fleet, giving an account that the French fleet had sallied out of Brest, with twenty-four ships of the line, and had engaged the English fleet, in a desperate and bloody battle, from morning to night, which ended in a total victory on our side. There are seven of the French ships sunk and burnt, and four taken. There are two of our capital ships sunk, and the admiral's ship was blown up, with its whole company, not one of whom is saved. Prince Edward, in the Phœnix, behaved to admiration; but, towards the end of the engagement, an unlucky cannon ball carried away both his legs, by which it is feared we shall loose that promising young prince. Our friend, poor Dr. Blair, would not go below deck, but stood by the prince's side during the whole engagement, till his head was carried off by a double-headed shot.

"About three hours after the arrival of this express, there arrived another from the west, giving an account of the landing of the French in Torbay, to the number of twenty thousand foot, and five thousand horse. They believe already, in London, that they are sixty thousand strong. The panic is inconceivable. The people in the country are hurrying up to town; those in the town are hurrying down to the country. Nobody thinks of resistance. Every one believes the French, Popery, and the Pretender, to be at their heels.

"What adds to our general confusion is, the discovery of treachery in our councils. Mr. Pitt is sent to the Tower, for holding a secret correspondence with the French:—his ciphers and letters are taken. Mr. Wood, our friend, (if he can be said to deserve that name,) is thrown into a dungeon; and there will be certain proofs to convict him of that treachery.

"In order to prepare the way for this blow, the perfidious French had employed somebody to blow up the magazine in the Tower. I heard the explosion this morning about five o'clock. All London is covered with rubbish, and stones and brick, and broken arms. There fell into our back court a shattered musket, and the bloody leg of a man. I thought the day of judgment was come when I first heard the explosion, and began seriously to think of my sins.

"These events will, all of them, make a figure in future historians; and it is happy for these gentlemen, who are, or ought to be, very scrupulous with regard to matters of fact, that they can so well reconcile the true and the marvellous.

"As to private news, there is little stirring; only Dr. Warburton turned Mahometan, and was circumcised last week. They say he is to write a book, in order to prove the divine legation of Mahomet; and it is not doubted but he will succeed as well as in proving that of Moses. I saw him yesterday in the Mall with his turban; which really becomes him very well.

"Poor Andrew Millar is declared bankrupt; his debts amount to above £40,000, and it is said his creditors will not get above three shillings in the pound. All the world allow him to have been diligent and industrious; but his misfortunes are ascribed to the extravagance of his wife, a very ordinary case in this city.

"Miss ——, yesterday morning declared her marriage with Dr. Armstrong; but we were surprised in the afternoon to find Mr. Short the optician, come in and challenge her for his wife. It seems she has been married privately for some time to both of them. Her sister has been much more prudent, whom we find to have confined herself entirely to gallantry, and to have privately entertained a correspondence with three gallants. I am, dear Ruat, with great truth, your most sincere friend and humble servant."[65:1]

About the commencement of November, Hume returned to Scotland, for he writes to Millar on 18th December that he has been six weeks in Edinburgh. He states, that he is correcting his "History of the Stuarts;" and says, "I fancy that I shall be able to put my account of that period of English history beyond controversy. As soon as this task is finished, I undertake the ancient English history. I find the Advocates' Library very well provided with books, in this period: but before I finish, I shall pass a considerable time in London, to peruse the manuscripts in the Museum."[65:2]

On his return he left behind him, to be published in London, the two volumes of his "History of England, under the House of Tudor," of which he says in his "own life,"—"The clamour against this performance was almost equal to that against the History of the two first Stuarts. The reign of Elizabeth was particularly obnoxious."

He had now published the whole of that department of his History, from which his opinions on the later progress of the British constitution can be derived; and the epoch of this publication calls for some notice of the manner in which subsequent inquirers have found that he performed his task.[65:3] He was not like such writers as Clarendon and Brady, the interested or prejudiced advocate of the crown against the people; and we must look for the causes of his erroneous views in what he did not know, or did not believe, rather than in what he wilfully misrepresented. In his "Essay on Commerce," published in 1752, we find him thus foreshadowing the principle on which he was to treat the History of Britain:—"Lord Bacon, accounting for the great advantages obtained by the English in their wars with France, ascribes them chiefly to the superior ease and plenty of the common people among the former; yet the government of the two kingdoms was at that time pretty much alike." This assertion has been satisfactorily proved to be erroneous. The spirit of credulity in historical inquiry makes out every thing ancient to be better and greater than its modern representative. The spirit of scepticism questions whatever is said in favour of antiquity. The sceptic cannot throw doubt on the existing wonders of modern times. If one nation is far beyond another in arts, arms, civilization, or wealth, the facts cannot be denied; but when he looks back into past ages, the pliability of the evidence admits the influence of the levelling principle of scepticism, the tendency of which is to make all mankind seem much alike; and Hume, who would not have ventured to say that in his own day the constitutions of France and England were very much alike, considered it but a piece of proper caution to discard as fallacious the evidence that there was any great difference between them in former times.

Unquestionably the doubting or inquiring spirit is a valuable quality in a historian; for the narratives of human affairs are full of falsehoods, which it is the philosophical historian's function to discard. But the sifting will not be satisfactory, if the materials subjected to it have not been largely and laboriously collected; and the charge against Hume is, that he applied it to imperfect data. Where the data are insufficient, credulity and scepticism are merely the counterparts of each other, and produce erroneous results nearly alike. Those who proclaimed Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller, to be a liar, for statements which have now been authenticated, believed in the account given of a fictitious people, in an impudent forgery, called Psalmanazer's Formosa, which would not now impose for a moment on any educated person. Our enlarged knowledge of the matters to be subjected to sceptical analysis, has now, in both cases, brought us to the right conclusion.

An inquirer into the structure of the earth, who should know nothing of its crust but the sandy plains of Germany, would, were he of a sceptical spirit, discredit all those geological wonders which the most sceptical of scientific men now believe.[68:1] In relation to some parts of the British constitution, Hume was in the position of such an investigator. His early prejudice against the study of the law, prevented him from being fully acquainted with a science, the knowledge of which is essential to any man who would clearly develop the progress of our constitution,—the common law of England. He did not understand its stubborn immovable nature, its solid impregnable masonry, against which the ambitious violence of monarchs, and the fury of popular tumults raged in vain. From the day when Gascoigne committed Henry V. to prison, to that when surly tyrannical old Sir Edward Coke argued face to face with King James against the interference of the prerogative with the independent authority of his court, those who were the honest administrators of the common law held that they were no man's servants, and no man's masters, but the sworn expounders of a settled rule of action, which no power within the realm could sway. It might be full of strange conceits, of passages hard to determine, of unreasonable and often cruel rules: but what this oracle bade them, that were they bound to do, be the consequences what they might.

To a mere onlooker, this system appeared to be clumsy and barbarous, and unendowed with that philosophical symmetry which characterized the rival system of the civil law. It required that one should have a full knowledge of its massive structure, and passive power of resistance, to appreciate its value in a country where king, nobles, and common people, were alike characterized by party spirit, courage, and restless activity. A philosopher, indulging in a distant contemplation, would at once prefer the nice philosophical adaptation to the wants of a state, and the fine logical structure, with which a despotic power, able to manipulate the laws at its own will, had endowed the system of Justinian; and if he found that the administrators of the rude common law waged a determined war against this philosophical code, his contempt for the one, and his admiration of the other, would be likely to be increased. But there is no doubt that the advocates of the common law were right in resisting the introduction of the pliant principles of the civilians. If it be true that the common law, and the constitution which grew along with it, embodied no philosophical principle of liberty, it is also true that they embodied no philosophical principle of despotism, such as that which was ready made in the Justinian legislation. The theories of passive obedience, and the sacredness of the monarchical character, were strangers to it; and these doctrines, so attractive to those who profit by them, were introduced by the civilians. In presence of the unbending operation of the common law, and dependent on a surly suspicious parliament, the sovereign might yet, if he were a man of talent and courage, be very powerful and very tyrannical: but he had none of those attributes through which the ingenuity of the civilians had divested him of all the moral failings, so far as they were accompanied with the moral responsibilities of a human being. He was often a "most dread sovereign:" but it was for these novel doctrines, the fruit of the reading of the clergy and the ecclesiastical lawyers, to invest him with the attributes of "sacred majesty."

The supporters of the common law, and of the old popular rights, strove to keep the law above the king. Those who drew their constitutional principles from the civilians and canonists, desired to place the king above the law. They accomplished their object in name, but not in fact, by incorporating with the constitutional law those fictions, that the king never dies, is not responsible, does not require to appear by his attorney, suffers no laches, &c. But in reality the old principles which made the king merely the head of a community, all of whom were subjected to the law, substantially held its ground; for, in so far as the monarch was exempted from responsibilities, in the same proportion was he deprived of any powers which he could exercise otherwise than through a responsible minister.

There was in Hume a like want of appreciation of the value of parliamentary forms and privileges, and a corresponding indifference about their violation. He had not sufficiently studied the Journals of the Commons, and did not trace the rise and development of that system of procedure which has protected our own liberties, and afforded a model for the legislative assemblies of all free nations.[71:1] It was in the Long Parliament, and under the eye of the able men of business who then held the lead, that this noble system was brought to perfection; but the reader whose historical information is derived solely from Hume, knows little of its value. Thus unconscious of the practical importance of the rights and privileges of the English people, he did not sympathize with those who expected alarming consequences from their infringement. He involved those who put the protection of their legal rights to the issue of the sword, in the same contemptuous estimate with the fanatics whom he charged with convulsing the state about religious differences of no essential moment. In either case the event at issue was of so little importance in his estimation, that he had small charity for those who made it a vitally important concern.[72:1] But in all these matters we look back on Hume with the light of later times. To appreciate his services to constitutional history, we must, while we keep in view the successful labours of later inquirers, remember how little had been done by his predecessors. The old chroniclers, such as Hall and Holingshed, scarcely ever deign to descend from the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war, to mention constitutional matters; and perhaps, in an impartial estimate, it will be admitted that in the gradual progress towards a better appreciation of what is truly valuable in British history, no one writer has taken so great a stride as Hume.

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