_After a Painting by Sir Antonio More._ ]
EDITOR OF THE CALENDARS OF SPANISH STATE PAPERS LECTURER IN SPANISH HISTORY AND LITERATURE PEMBROKE COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
_Published October 1906_ _Re-issued July 1911_
The books left by a man whose every thought was about books, are even more himself than were his actions during life. In fact, at times, I think it is the case with all who write; for, after all, what a man writes is really far more important than anything he does.
Most of us in wandering through a churchyard where we come upon a friend’s name, on a tombstone, feel a spirit of revolt. It is no good to tell us death is as natural as life. We all know that, and still feel that in some strange way we have been defrauded by the death of a dear friend. Nothing is more unjust than is a natural cause.
Even the Greeks, with all their joyousness, must have felt this when they invented Nemesis.
We Caledonians, who took our faith from Hippo (nane o’ yer Peters, gie me Paul), perhaps stand up against the stabs of Fate better than those nurtured in the most damnable doctrine of freewill. Once allow it, and life becomes a drunken whirligig on which sit grave and reverend citizens playing on penny whistles, all attired in black.
If though the name upon the tombstone strikes a chill to the heart, half of regret and half of fear—for what, when all is said and done, is your _memento mori_ but blue funk?—when we pick up a dead friend’s book upon a stall, published at twelve-and-sixpence and ticketed a penny, we must reflect—that is, the most of us—that to that favour we shall come, and all the pages, that cost us so much thought in the writing, to be tied together with a piece of string and sold with the base trash of Smith and Jones and Brown, fellows who had no style, nor knew the difference betwixt invention and imagination, humour or wit, and did not know a colophon from an illuminated capital, and sold all in a lot.
Therefore I am glad that this edition of one of Hume’s best works is coming out, and I who saw him laid to rest in the dry, marly earth of that drear East End cemetery only a year ago—or was it ten, for when a man is dead time ceases for him and for ourselves in thinking of him—am writing these few lines to do my best to keep his memory green.