Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 20.djvu/624

Rh 600 ROBERTSON called for. Before the end of the author's life the book had reached its fourteenth edition ; and in the opinion of some it remains Robertson's greatest work. It soon brought him other rewards than literary fame. In 1759 he was appointed chaplain of Stirling Castle, in 1761 one of His Majesty's chaplains in ordinary, and in 1762 he was chosen principal of the university of Edinburgh. Two years later the office of king's historiographer was revived in his favour with a salary of 200 a year. His income greatly surpassed the revenue of any Presbyterian minister before him and at least equalled that of some of the bishops when Episcopacy was established in Scotland. It is the more surprising therefore that this moment of exceptional prosperity should have been chosen by some of his most valued friends to advise him to forsake the Scottish for the English Church and try for preferment south of the Tweed ; and the surprise becomes wonder when we learn that those friends were Sir Gilbert Elliot and David Hume. The imprudence, to say nothing of the questionable morality, of such a step would seem too glaring to allow of its recommendation by any honourable well-wishers. Perhaps no man was more fitted than Robertson to measure and reject such injudicious advice, and he probably never gave the matter a second thought. He remained at home among his own people. The rest of Robertson's life was uneventful to a degree even surpassing the proverbial uneventfulness of the lives of scholars. He was casting about for another historical subject in the very year in which his first work appeared, and he was wont to consult his friends on the choice of a period with a naivete which shows how little the arduous- ness of historical research was then understood. Hume advised him to write a history of Greece or else lives in the manner of Plutarch. Dr John Blair urged him to write a complete history of England, while Horace Wai- pole suggested a history of learning. It must be recorded to Robertson's credit that he showed a preference from the first for the subject which he ultimately selected, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles the Fifth. He took uncommon pains with the work and devoted to it ten consecutive years of labour. It appeared in three volumes quarto in 1769. In 1777 he published his History of America and in 1791 his Disquisition concerning the Knowledge which the Ancients had of India, which concluded his historical labours and appeared only two years before his death, which occurred near Edinburgh on the llth June 1793. His fame had long been European, and he left no rival in the field of historical composition save Gibbon alone. For an adequate appreciation of Robertson's position in British literature, and more especially of his rank as an historian, we have to consider the country and the age in which he was born and his own personal qualities and limits. Considering the small size and poverty of the country, Scotland had made a more than creditable figure in litera- ture in the great age of the Reformation and the Renais- Its scholars, civilians, and professors of logic and sance. philosophy were welcomed wherever learning flourished, except, perhaps, in England. All Europe could not show a more brilliant writer and publicist than Buchanan, and " the best romance that ever was written " (the words are Cowper's) was produced by a Scottish contemporary of Shakespeare, viz., the once famous Argenis of John Barclay. But the early triumphs of Scottish genius were all won in a foreign if familiar idiom, the common language of the learned ; and when Latin retreated before the growing importance of modern tongues the Scots had no literary vernacular on which to fall back. For a century and a half (1600-1750) a Scottish writer to be read was forced to use a foreign language, Latin, English, and even occasion- ally French. As Burton 1 has well remarked, this alone was sufficient to account in a large measure for the literary barrenness of the country. There was unquestionably another cause at work, the fervent religious zeal with which the principles of the Reformation had been em- braced : neither science, literature, nor art could obtain much attention from men who regarded them all as " de- ceitful vanities," leading the mind away from the one thing needful. In a small and sparsely peopled country, with- out wealth, commerce, or even politics in the larger sense, theology became a too absorbing and unique mental stimu- lus. This was, we may say, proved by the fact that as soon as the union with England opened a wider scope for Scottish energy and enterprise the theological temperature immediately fell, a change witnessed with natural alarm by the more zealous clergy. " The rise of our too great fondness for trade," writes the Rev. Robert Wodrow in 1709, "to the neglect of our more valuable interests, I humbly think, will be written on our judgment " (Buckle, vol. ii. p. 301). The growth of wealth stimulated the growth of the other great factor of civilization, that of knowledge, and by the middle of the 18th century, just at the time when Robertson was planning his History of Scotland, a wide spirit of inquiry was abroad. Scottish intellect had risen from the tomb in which it had lain entranced for more than a hundred years. The Scottish contribution to British literature in the last half of the century is distinctly superior to that produced in the southern portion of the island. In philosophy and political and economic science the balance is immensely in favour of Scotland. Robertson was therefore no inexplicable prodigy an "obscure Scotch parson" writing "like a minister of state," as it pleased Walpole and the London fops to regard him. He lived in a society far more pro- pitious to high literary work than could be found in London or the English universities. The connexion between philosophy and history is closer than appears at first sight. The study of man and his faculties, even ontological speculations as to the nature and origin of the universe, lead by a logical sequence to a consideration of human evolution in time, that is, to history. The coincidence of philosophical speculation with historical achievement so repeatedly manifested can- not be accidental. The topic cannot be developed here ; but from the days of the Attic historians, who lived in an atmosphere electric with speculation, to the Hegelian historical school of Germany, the higher planes of history are found in near proximity to loftier peaks of philosophy. Hume, wonderful in all things, was perhaps most wonder- ful in this, that in him the two characters of the philo- sopher and the historian were completely united. He did not only, like Kant and Hegel, speculate about history ; he wrote it. Again, we must admire the peculiar fortune of Robertson : he lived during many years in close contact and intimacy with the greatest philosophic genius of his age, perhaps of modern times. Of the three great British historians of the 18th century two were Scotsmen. The exact place of Robertson with regard to his two friends Hume and Gibbon, and to such historians as the rest of Europe had to offer, presents a question of some nicety, because it is complicated by extraneous considerations, so to speak, which should not weigh in an abstract estimate, but cannot be excluded in a concrete and practical one. If we regard only Robert- son's potential historic power, the question is not so much whether he was equal to either of his two friends as whether he was not superior to both. The man who wrote the review of the state of Europe prefixed to the 1 Hist, of Scotland, vol. viii. p. 544.