David Hume. Mark G. Spencer

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(Bristol, 1995), 13–14; D’Alembert to Hume, 28 February 1767, in ibid., 183. D’Alembert wrote the short article on ecclesiastical history for the Encyclopédie, 5:223.

      9. Friedrich Melchoir Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique par Grimm, Diderot, Raynal, Meister, etc., 16 vols., ed. Maurice Tourneux (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1879), 7:13. The original passage in French is: “Nous avons souvent sollicité M. Hume, pendant son séjour en France, d’écrire une Histoire ecclésiastique. Ce serait en ce moment une des plus belles entreprises de littérature, et un des plus importants services rendus à la philosophie et à l’humanité.”

      10. Voltaire’s attacks on the Church and blasphemy laws intensified in the 1760s owing to the judicial murder of Jean Calas in 1762. D’Alembert himself had written in 1765 a notable work on the Jesuits, Sur la destruction des Jesuites en France, and the final volumes of the text of Diderot’s Encyclopédie appeared in 1765 and 1766. They contained many attacks on religions and the churches despite the censorship of one of its publishers.

      11. “Je ne me consolerai, pourtant, jamais d’être privé de cette Histoire Ecclésiastique, que je vous ai demandé tant de fois, que vous seul peut-être en Europe êtes en état de faire, et qui seroit bien aussi intéressante que l’histoire Grecque et Romaine, si vous vouliez prendre la peine de peindre au naturel notre mère Ste. Eglise.” D’Alembert to Hume, 1 May 1773, in Letters, ed. Hill Burton, 218.

      12. See “Of National Characters,” E 199–201n3.

      13. Hume’s French friends missed his belief in the inevitability of the continuance of religion; see Roger L. Emerson, “Hume’s Histories,” in Essays on David Hume, Medical Men, and the Scottish Enlightenment: “Industry, Knowledge, and Humanity” (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 137.

      14. See the forthcoming bibliography compiled for The History of England by Roger L. Emerson and Mark G. Spencer. This shows, in particular, Hume’s surprising familiarity with medieval sources.

      15. Under a 1697 English act, it was illegal to blaspheme or to deny the doctrine of the Trinity or the articles of the creeds approved by the Anglican Church. In Scotland, Hume could have been prosecuted under the same laws that led to the hanging in 1697 of Thomas Aikenhead.

      16. All quotations from the Encyclopédie are to the following edition: Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers . . . (Paris: Brisson, David, Le Breton and Durand, 1751; reprinted in 5 vols., New York: Readex Microprint Corporation, 1969). Page numbers are to that set and not to the original volumes; 2:335–38.

      17. A fine account of Voltaire’s work in the books named above is given by Brumfitt in La Philosophie de l’histoire.

      18. Hume’s general verdict on Voltaire was, “I know that author cannot be depended upon with regard to Facts; but his general Views are sometimes sound, & always entertaining,” L 1:423. Like Hume, he emphasized the uncertainty of all accounts of ancient peoples.

      19. H 1:29–46 passim.

      20. Adam Smith to William Strahan, 9 November 1776, in L 2:450.

      21. On Varro, see Enlightenment Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Kim Sloan (London: British Museum Press, 2003), 169.

      22. There is a short passage in Tacitus on Jews, History, bk. 5, 1–6, in The Complete Works of Tacitus, trans. A. J. Church and W. J. Brodribb (New York: Modern Library, 1942), 657–60. This depicts them as odd and despicable and Moses as a power-hungry fraud.

      23. See Roger L. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 31–32, 52, 71; James Coutts, A History of the University of Glasgow (Glasgow: Maclehose and Sons, 1909), 170, 192.

      24. Anthony Browning, “History,” in Fortuna Domus, ed. J. B. Neilson (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1952), 41–57; 44.

      25. Robert Wodrow, Analecta or Some Remarkable Providences . . . , 4 vols., ed. Mathew Leishman (Glasgow: Maitland Club, 1842–43), 4:212.

      26. Divinity students were not generally charged for the courses they took to prepare for the ministry.

      27. James Balfour Paul, ed. Diary of George Ridpath, Minister of Stitchel, 1755–1761 (Edinburgh: Scottish Record Society, 3rd ser., vol. 2, 1922), 200.

      28. The manuscripts of those lectures can be found in the Library of New College, Edinburgh University, MS W12a 5\2. Each Latin lecture as an English language summary on loose sheets, which are still in the volumes. I have depended mainly on those summaries for what follows.

      29. The summary uses spaces as punctuation and is not always written in full sentences.

      30. This was rather like Jonathan Edwards’s History of the Work of Redemption (written 1739; published Edinburgh, 1774), but Cuming did not see the cycles of life (degeneracy—revelation—moral improvement—backsliding—revelation, etc. ) as always falling lower; his tended, after 1300 A.D., to be upward and the work more optimistic, as was characteristic of moderate men in the Kirk of his day.

      31. His course somewhat resembled Antoine Goguet’s The Origin of laws, sciences and their progress among the most ancient nations (Paris, 1758; Edinburgh, 1761). The translator was the Reverend Robert Henry.

      32. George Chalmers, The life of Thomas Ruddiman (Edinburgh: John Stockdale; London: William Laing, 1794). The Rankenian Club is sometimes cited as the first Edinburgh club of adult intellectuals devoted to the discussion of religious and philosophical ideas.

      33. The first letter was sent anonymously but is contained in the Leven and Melville Papers, National Archives of Scotland, GD 26\13\602. The second is in Philosophical Transactions 42 (1743), 420–21.

      34. What follows rests largely on the notes for Mackie’s lectures and on “A discourse read to the Philosophical Society, 4 March 1741” on “vulgar errors and how to detect ‘em,” both held at Edinburgh University Library [EUL]. Those are discussed by L. W. Sharp, “Charles Mackie, the First Professor of History at Edinburgh University,” Scottish Historical Review 41 (1962): 23–45. See also Esther Mijers,“News from the Republick of Letters”: Scottish Students, Charles Mackie, and the United Provinces, 1650–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2012); her discussion of Mackie as a historian runs pp. 157–84.

      35. EUL, Laing Manuscript 2:37.10; there are also notes dealing with this topic that seem related to his course in MS Dc.5.24.2.

      36. The Scottish chronology for the Middle Ages was first sorted out by Thomas Innes and David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes, in books published in 1729 and 1776.

      37. This had been apparent to Sir Robert Sibbald and his friends in the 1680s when they rejected some of the fabulous genealogies offered to them by others. One for the Dukes of Argyle showed them as descendants of King Arthur and through him of Brut (Brute or Brutus), a descendant of Aeneas the Trojan. The mythical history of the Scots kings can still be seen, in part, in Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh, where the portraits of forty of them, painted by Jacob de Wet in the late seventeenth century, still hang.

      38. Among the latter were Gilbert Elliot, Sir Harry Erskine, William Mure of Caldwell, James Oswald of Dunniker, Sir James Steuart of Goodtrees, and many more men whom Hume knew socially throughout his life.

      39. The College reserved

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