After 1752 Hume relinquished his philosophical studies. He was in that year appointed librarian to the Faculty of Advocates. Here, surrounded by books, he formed the design of writing The History of England,' which he endeavoured especially to make interesting.' 'He wrote his history,' said Horne Tooke, as witches say their prayers, backwards from Stuart to Tudor and so to Plantagenet.' Hume had scant respect for dominant Whig prejudices, but there was a vis vivida about his narrative which gradually won him readers even among his opponents. In 1763 Hume was appointed to a post in the British Embassy at Paris, and in the French capital he was for the time being the reigning sensation. His scepticism rendered him à la mode to such an extent that great ladies were not content unless the 'gros David' was to be seen at their receptions, while at the opera 'his broad unmeaning face was usually to be seen entre deux jolis minois.' He was much too sensible to lose his head, but his Parisian sojourn brought him into contact with the unfortunate Rousseau (already an out-pensioner of Bedlam '), who repaid much kindness by the fixed malignity of the suspicious lunatic. He spent the remainder of his days at Edinburgh in peaceful ' opulence,' sauntering agreeably and compiling the too brief autobiographical memoir, My Own Life. There he died on August 25th, 1776. A valuable addition was made to our knowledge of Hume as recently as 1888, when Dr. Birkbeck Hill published his Correspondence, mainly with the publisher William Strahan.

،

Scotsmen were at the acme of their unpopularity in England in Hume's time, and he liked to rail back at the 'depraved barbarians who inhabit the banks of the Thames.' But, apart from this somewhat fictitious bitterness, no more genial spirit could be found than David Hume.

1 See Chapter VI.

In his letters we find just the vein of quiet pleasantry, often at his own expense, and sunny, amiable contentment, that we expect from the writer of My Own Life and the chosen ally and best friend of Adam Smith. Unless it were among this same circle, which included, besides Smith, the historian William Robertson, it would be difficult to find so good an example of honourable independence and cheerful self-reliance among the great writers of our country. It is interesting for a moment to contemplate this Edinburgh group as typical of the intellectual aristocracy of the eighteenth century. The serenity of their outlook upon human life and their calm prospect of death, the amount of wisdom and toleration which they combined with principles liberal but in no wise subversive, and their union of great intellectual industry with a mild and placid scepticism conspire to give them an enviable place among great minds who have found life emphatically worth living.

The acuteness and subtlety with which Hume, by prolonging Berkeley's contention that Matter was an abstraction, had shown that Mind was to be considered as an abstraction also, led to a reaction of Common Sense,' as it was called. The founder of this school was Thomas Reid (1710-1796), a native of Kincardine, who occupied the chair of Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen from 1752, and in 1764 published his Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense. But this appeal to Common Sense in philosophy, or, as Reid's disciples, Oswald, Beattie, and Dugald Stewart put it, to external reality, as a fundamental law of human belief, is now pretty well understood to be on a par with Dr. Johnson's kicking a stone as a refutation of Berkeley.

Of more real interest in its consequences is the work of David Hartley (1705-1757), a fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, who had scruples about signing the Thirty

H

nine Articles and gave up the Church for medicine. In 1748 he published his Observations on Man, his Frame, kis Duty, and his Expectations, which is historically curious as the first attempt to explain the physiological mechanism of psychological phenomena. Linked with this was the theory promulgated by Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) in his Zoonomia. Hartley's theory was a combination of an idea thrown out by Newton as to vibrations of the ether being the cause of sensation with the doctrine of Locke respecting association of ideas. Darwin substituted for vibrations sensorial motions, and refined upon Hartley's theories in directions which have not commended themselves to subsequent thinkers. The same doctrine of association of ideas was applied to morals by Abraham Tucker (17051774) in his Light of Nature Pursued.1 Hartley's views were also adopted with some modifications by Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), who sought to detach his psychological doctrine from his physical hypothesis.

Gilbert White (1720-1793).

II. Naturalists and Geographers.

Gilbert White was born on July 18th, 1720, in the little Hampshire village which his writings have rendered so familiar. Having obtained a fellowship at Oriel College, Oxford, he returned to Selborne as a curate in 1747; ten years later he accepted the living of Moreton-Pinkney in Northamptonshire, but imposed the duty upon a curate, and took up his permanent abode at his beloved Selborne, where he officiated as curate for many years and died, unmarried, on June 26th, 1793. He was a marked contrast to his self-complacent contemporary Buffon, but, like other great prophets of nature-Walton, Wordsworth, Darwin, Wallace,

1 See p. 112.

Millet, Thoreau, Jefferies-he was singularly unworldly and essentially pure-minded and gentle-hearted. It is the absence of pretension about his famous Natural History of Selborne (which was published in 1789 and well received from the first) that gives to his unsystematic narrative the artless yet fresh and graphic directress of a series of impromptu notes and letters. The keenness of observation is there of the man who grudged to spend the daylight in his study; yet when he does find time for expression, his style is no less charming and unaffected than his interpretation is shrewd or his curiosity well directed.

The great majority of White's observations were made in an extremely small area. He did not go about seeking rarities, but concentrated his attention upon the fauna of his own parish and their habits; and here it may be noted that faithful and competent observers of the habits of animals are very much smaller in number than the students who are prepared to classify and arrange and dissect and anatomise them. Men like White and Waterton and Frank Buckland form a very small percentage of learned and accomplished ornithologists.

The letters which form the bulk of The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (London, 1789, 4to) were written apparently between 1766 and 1788. Forty-four were addressed to Thomas Pennant (apropos of the revised edition of Pennant's British Zoology, 1768-70) and the remaining sixty-six to the Hon. Daines Barrington. The Antiquities are comprised in twenty-six additional and unaddressed letters. The original edition, which was published at a guinea, bears no name on the title-page, but the Advertisement is signed 'Gil. White' (his usual signature). Since then upwards of seventy different editions have appeared, and among the numerous editors we find Mitford, Markwick, Aikin, Jardine, Rennie, J. G. Wood,

Frank Buckland (1875), and Prof. Thomas Bell (1877)— the last edition mentioned being the most desirable.' White did not in the least regard himself as independent of books. His remarks show that he knew Ray well, and was also familiar with the works of Derham and Willughby, of Benj. Stillingfleet and George Edwards, and even of the credulous Dr. Plot; among the poets he quotes Shakespeare, Thomson, Virgil, and Lucretius. The disjointed character of his work is explained by the fact that his book was not composed from notes, but consists of the notes and observations themselves, jotted down at first hand direct from nature in the evenings, after hours of patient study in the open air.

Apart from The Natural History, White left many other notes and fragments of observations in manuscript, and also A Naturalists' Calendar, with Observations in Various Branches of Natural History, forming excerpts from much fuller journals, published under this title by Aikin two years after White's death. This Calendar is appended to most of the later editions of The Natural History. Some additional letters have also appeared in Buckland's edition and elsewhere, as have about a dozen poems of no great merit in the style of Somerville.

There is little piquancy in Gilbert White. One does not read his Selborne with excitement (like Burke), or with avidity (like Fielding): it is in a low key; it touches only upon minor matters; it is not eloquent, or witty, or profound; it has only now and then a twinkle of humour or a glint of fancy, and yet it has lived a hundred years and promises to live hundreds more. Research and erudition are only apparently just beginning to concentrate upon White's life, and observations and the bibliography of his writings. 'In the meantime, how many learned and elaborate

1 Two elaborate editions have appeared quite recently (Nov. 1899).