Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 5.djvu/55

Rh turtle-eating- alderman than of a refined philosopher. His speech in English was rendered ridiculous by the broadest Scottish accent, and his French, was, if possible, still more laughable ; so that wisdom, most certainly, never disguised herself before in so uncouth a garb. Though now near fifty years old, he was healthy and strong ; but his health and strength, far from being advantageous to bis figure, instead of manly comeliness, had only the appearance of rusticity. His wearing a uniform added greatly to his natural awkwardness, for he wore it like a grocer of the train-bands. Sinclair was a lieutenant-general, and was sent to the courts of Vienna and Turin as a military envoy, to see that their quota of troops was furnished by the Austrians and Piedmontese. It was therefore thought necessary that his secretary should appear to be an officer; and Hume was accordingly disguised in scarlet"

The letter to Mr Home we have quoted above, gives an idea of the literary employments of the author during the intervals of his official engagements at Turin, and on his return to Britain he exhibited the fruit of his labour in a second edition of his " Essays, Moral and Political," which was published in 1748, with four additional essays, and in a re-construction of the first part of his Treatise of Human Nature, which he published immediately after, under the title "Philosophical Essays concerning the Human Understanding," and formed the first part of the well-known corrected digest of the Treatise of Human Nature, into the "Inquiry concerning Human Nature." In the advertisement the author informs the .public that "most of the principles and reasonings in this volume were published in a work in three volumes, called A Treatise of Human Nature, a work which the author had projected before he left college, and which he wrote and published not long after. The philosophy of 'this work is essentially the same as that of which he had previously sketched a more rude and complicated draught. The object, (or more properly speaking, the conclusion arrived at, for the person who sets out without admissions, and inquires whether any thing can be ascertained in philosophy, can scarcely be said to have an object in view,) is the same system of doubt which he previously expounded; a scepticism, not like that of Boyle and others, which merely went to show the uncertainty of the conclusions attending particular species of argument, bat a sweeping argument to show that by the structure of the understanding, the result of all investigations, on all subjects, must ever be doubt." The Inquiry must be to every reader a work far more pleasing, and we may even say, instructive, than the Treatise. While many of the more startling arguments, assuming the appearance of paradoxes, sometimes indistinctly connected with the subject, are omitted, others are laid down in a clearer form; the whole is subjected to a more compact arrangement, and the early style of the writer, which to many natural beauties, united a considerable feebleness and occasional harshness, makes in this work a very near approach to the elegance and classic accuracy, which much perseverance, and a refined taste enabled the author to acquire in the more advanced period of his life. Passing over, as our limits must compel us, any attempt at an analytical comparison of the two works, and a narrative of the changes in the author's opinions, we must not omit the circumstance, that the Essay on Miracles, which it will be remembered the author withheld from his Treatise, was attached to the Inquiry, probably after a careful revision and correction. Locke had hinted in a few desultory observations the grounds of a disbelief in the miracles attributed to the early Christian church, and Dr Conyers Middleton, in his Free Inquiry into the miraculous powers supposed to have subsisted in the Christian church from the earliest ages,