Page:A biographical dictionary of eminent Scotsmen, vol 5.djvu/69

Rh Davenport, at Wooton, in the county of Derby, a gentleman who kindly undertook to lull the suspicions of the irritable philosopher by accepting of a remuneration amounting to £30 a year. Rousseau arrived in London, and appearing in public in his Armenian dress, excited much notice, both from the public in general, and from literary men. Hume, by his interest with the government obtained for him a pension of £100 a year, which it suited those in authority to wish should be kept secret. Rousseau expressed much satisfaction at this condition, but he afterwards declined the grant, hinting at the secrecy as an impediment to his acceptance of it; his zealous friend procured the removal of this impediment, and the pension was again offered, but its publicity afforded a far more gratifying opportunity of refusal. Immediately after he had retired to Wooton, with his housekeeper and his dog, nothing occurred apparently to infringe his amicable intercourse with Hume; but that individual was little aware of the storm in preparation. The foreign philosopher began to discover the interest of his first appearance in Britain subsiding. He was not in a place where he could be followed by crowds of wondering admirers, the press was lukewarm and regardless, and sometimes ventured to bestow on him a sneer, and above all no one sought to persecute him. The feelings which these unpleasing circumstances occasioned, appear to have been roused to sudden action by a sarcastic letter in the name of the king of Prussia, of which Rousseau presumed D'Alembert to have been the author, but which was claimed by Horace Walpole, and which made the circle of the European journals; and by an anonymous critique of a somewhat slighting nature, which had issued from a British magazine, but which appears not to have been remarked or much known at the period. Of these two productions it pleased Rousseau to presume David Hume the instigator, and he immediately framed in his mind the idea of a black project for his ruin, countenanced and devised by his benefactor under the mask of friendship. Rousseau then wrote a fierce letter to Hume, charging him in somewhat vague terms with a number of horrible designs, and in the general manner of those who bring accusations of unutterable things, referring him to his own guilty breast for a more full explanation. Hume naturally requested a farther explanation of the meaning of this ominous epistle, and he received in answer a narrative which occupies forty printed pages. It were vain to enumerate the subjects of complaint in this celebrated document. There was an accusation of terrible affectation on the part of Hume, in getting a portrait of the unfortunate exile engraved; he had insulted him by procuring dinners to be sent to his lodgings in London, (a circumstance which Hume accounted for on the ground of there having been no convenient chop house in the neighbourhood.) He had also flattered him (an attention which Hume maintains was not unacceptable at the period,) with a deep laid malignity. Hume had also formed a plan of opening all his letters, and examining his correspondence, (an accusation which Hume denied.) Hume was intimate with the son of an individual who entertained towards Rousseau a mortal hatred. A narrative of the treatment which Rousseau had met with at Neufchatel, and which he wished to have published in England, was delayed at the press; but we shall give in Rousseau's own words (as translated) the most deadly article of the charge, premising, that the circumstances were occasioned by Hume's having attempted to impose on him a coach hired and payed for, as a retour vehicle: "As we were sitting one evening, after supper, silently by the fire-side, I caught his eye intently fixed on mine, as indeed happened very often ; and that in a manner of which it is very difficult to give an idea. At that time he gave me a steadfast, piercing look, mixed with a sneer, which greatly disturbed me. To get rid of the embarrassment I lay under, I endeavoured to look full at him in my

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