Note 607 — THE LIFE OF SAMUEL JOHNSON, LL.D. (continued 4)

'Sir, Hume is a Tory by chance, as being a Scotchman; but not upon a principle of duty, for he has no principle. If he is anything, he is a Hobbist.' Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 30. Horace Walpole's opinion was very different. 'Are not atheism and bigotry first cousins? Was not Charles II. an atheist and a bigot? and does Mr. Hume pluck a stone from a church but to raise an altar to tyranny?' Letters, v. 444. Hume wrote in 1756:—'My views of things are more conformable to Whig principles; my representations of persons to Tory prejudices.' J.H. Burton's Hume, ii. 11. Hume's Toryism increased with years. He says in his Autobiography/ (p. xi.) that all the alterations which he made in the later editions of his History of the Stuarts, 'he made invariably to the Tory side.' Dr. Burton gives instances of these; Life of Hume, ii. 74. Hume wrote in 1763 that he was 'too much infected with the plaguy prejudices of Whiggism when he began the work.' Ib. p. 144. In 1770 he wrote:—'I either soften or expunge many villainous, seditious Whig strokes which had crept into it.' Ib. p. 434. This growing hatred of Whiggism was, perhaps, due to pique. John Home, in his notes of Hume's talk in the last weeks of his life, says: 'He recurred to a subject not unfrequent with him—that is, the design to ruin him as an author, by the people that were ministers at the first publication of his History, and called themselves Whigs.' Ib. p. 500. As regards America, Hume was with the Whigs, as Johnson had perhaps learnt from their common friend, Mr. Strahan. 'He was,' says Dr. Burton, 'far more tolerant of the sway of individuals over numbers, which he looked upon as the means of preserving order and civilization, than of the predominance of one territory over another, which he looked upon as subjugation.' Ib. p. 477. Quite at the beginning of the struggle he foretold that the Americans would not be subdued, unless they broke in pieces among themselves. Ib. p. 482. He was not frightened by the prospect of the loss of our supremacy. He wrote to Adam Smith:—'My notion is that the matter is not so important as is commonly imagined. Our navigation and general commerce may suffer more than our manufactures.' Ib. p. 484. Johnson's charge against Hume that he had no principle, is, no doubt, a gross one; yet Hume's advice to a sceptical young clergyman, who had good hope of preferment, that he should therefore continue in orders, was unprincipled enough. 'It is,' he wrote, 'putting too great a respect on the vulgar and on their superstitions to pique one's self on sincerity with regard to them. Did ever one make it a point of honour to speak truth to children or madmen? If the thing were worthy being treated gravely, I should tell him that the Pythian oracle, with the approbation of Xenophon, advised every one to worship the gods—[Greek: nomo poleos]. I wish it were still in my power to be a hypocrite in this particular. The common duties of society usually require it; and the ecclesiastical profession only adds a little more to an innocent dissimulation, or rather simulation, without which it is impossible to pass through the world.' Ib/. p. 187.