Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 4.djvu/291

Rh ing with a few sallies of wit, his pictures of human folly; but he was unhappy in the bold attempt. They had too much pleasing simplicity and good-humoured grotesqueness for the purpose to which they were applied. More like the good-natured humour of Goldsmith, than the piercing sarcasm of Voltaire, they might have served to strike the lighter foibles exhibited in our daily path ; but to attack the grander follies of mankind displayed in history, it may be said they did not possess sufficient venom to make formidable so light a weapon as wit.

We have been so much engrossed with the dreary details of malignity, that we will scarcely find room for many other details of Henry's life; but the history of the book is the history of the author in its fate is included all that the world need care to know, of the unassuming individual who composed it. It is with pleasure, then, that we turn to the brighter side; Henry calmly weathered out the storm which assailed him, and in his green old age, the world smiled upon his labours. Hume, who had so successfully trod the same field, was the first to meet Henry's book with a welcome hearty and sincere; he knew the difficulties of the task, and if he was sufficiently acute to observe that Henry was far behind himself, neither jealousy nor conceit provoked him to give utterance to such feelings. "His historical narratives," says this able judge, "are as full as those remote times seem to demand, and at the same time, his inquiries of the antiquarian kind omit nothing which can be an object of doubt or curiosity. The one as w r ell as the other is delivered with great perspicuity, and no less propriety, which are the true ornaments of this kind of writing ; all superfluous embellishments are avoided; and the reader will hardly find in our language any performance that unites together so perfectly the two great points of entertainment and instruction." Dr Henry had printed the first edition of the first five volumes of his bock at his own risk, but on a demand for a new edition, he entered into a transaction with a bookseller, which returned him £3300. In the middle of its career the work secured royal attention ; lord Mansfield recommended the author to George the Third, and his majesty "considering his distinguished talents, and great literary merit, and the importance of the very useful and laborious work in which he was so successfully engaged, as titles to his royal countenance and favour," bestowed on him a pension of a £100 a-year. For the honour of royal munificence, it is to be hoped that the gift was the reward of labour and literary merit, and not (as the author's enemies have proclaimed) the wages of the political principles he inculcated. The insinuation is, indeed, not without apparent foundation. Henry, if not a perverter of history in favour of arbitrary power, is at least one of those prudent speculators who are apt to look on government as something established on fixed and permanent principles, to which all opposing interests must give way on the government as something highly respectable, on the mass of the people as something not quite so respectable on the community as existing for the government, and not on the government as adapted to the conveniences of the community.

Five volumes of Dr Henry's history appeared before his death, and the ample materials he had left for the completion of the sixth were afterwards edited by Mr Laing, and a continuation was written by Mr Petit Andrews. The laborious author prepared the whole for the press with his own hand, notwithstanding a tremulous disorder, which compelled him to write on a book placed on his knee. In the latter years of his life, he retired to Milnfield, about twenty miles from Edinburgh, where he enjoyed the company of his friend and relative, Mr Laurie. In 1786, his constitution began visibly to decline; but he continued his labours till 1790. About that period his wife was affected with blindness from a cataract, and he accompanied her to Edinburgh, where she submitted to the usual operation, which, however, had not the desired effect during her husband's life-