D'après l'opinion que j'en ai monsieur, je l'ai jugé digne d'être connu de vous, et en lui procurant cet honneur, je crois lui donner la preuve la plus marquée du cas que je fais de lui.[107:A]
[109:1] Private Correspondence, &c. pp. 8, 9.
[110:1] This letter is printed in the Private Correspondence, p. 58. There are two duplicate originals of it among the MSS. R.S.E.
[113:1] Private Correspondence, &c. p. 54.
[116:1] The following anecdote of Hume, by Lord Charlemont, seems appropriate to this passage. "He never failed, in the midst of any controversy, to give its due praise to every thing tolerable that was either said or written against him. One day that he visited me in London, he came into my room laughing and apparently well pleased. 'What has put you into this good humour, Hume?' said I. 'Why man,' replied he, 'I have just now had the best thing said to me I ever heard. I was complaining in a company where I spent the morning, that I was very ill treated by the world, and that the censures put upon me were hard and unreasonable. That I had written many volumes, throughout the whole of which there were but a few pages that contained any reprehensible matter, and yet that for those few pages, I was abused and torn to pieces.' 'You put me in mind,' said an honest fellow in the company, whose name I did not know, 'of an acquaintance of mine, a notary public, who having been condemned to be hanged for forgery, lamented the hardship of his case; that after having written many thousand inoffensive sheets, he should be hanged for one line.'" _Hardy's Memoirs of Charlemont_, p. 121.
[119:1] _European Magazine_, 1785, p. 250.
The Publication of the History anterior to the Accession of the Tudors--Completion of the History--Inquiry how far it is a complete History--Hume's Intention to write an Ecclesiastical History--Opinions of Townsend and others on his History-- Appreciation of the Fine Arts--Hume's House in James's Court-- Its subsequent occupation by Boswell and Johnson--Conduct of David Mallet--Hume's Projects--The Douglas Cause-- Correspondence with Reid.
In 1762 there was published, in two quarto volumes, the "History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Cæsar, to the Accession of Henry VII." The farther back we proceed from those periods of which a full narrative of historical events is preserved by contemporary chroniclers, into those more obscure ages when even the lines of kings are hardly preserved, and fragments of laws, or of long obsolete literature, and antiquarian relics, are the historian's only guide, the less satisfactory is Hume's history, when compared with other historical works. The earliest part is thus the least valuable. He had here, however, to encounter difficulties which we are only at this day able to estimate, in the absence of those materials which the industry of antiquaries has lately brought to light, to so great an extent, as almost necessarily to supersede Hume's "History of England" during the early ages, as a source of historical knowledge.[121:1]