Page:The American encyclopedia of history, biography and travel (IA americanencyclop00blak).pdf/632

 autobiography, 'I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.' His health, however, becoming impaired by sedentary application, he, in 1634, went to Bristol, with a view of engaging in mercantile pursuits, but found them unsuitable to his disposition, that in a few months afterwards he took up his residence in France, and laid down a plan of life which he steadily and successfully pursued. 'I resolved,' he says, 'to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune; to maintain unimpaired my independency; and to regard every object as contemptible, except the improvement of my talents in literature.'

After a stay of three years abroad he returned to England, and, in 1738, published his Treatise of Human Nature, the fate of which he describes by saying, 'it fell dead born from the press.' Of too sanguine a temperament to be discouraged, he continued his literary labors, and in 1742, printed, at Edinburgh, the first part of his Essays, which were received in a manner that fully compensated for his former disappointments. In 1745, he went to England as tutor to the young Marqueis of Annandale, and after remaining in that situation for a twelvemonth, he stood candidate for the professorship of moral philosophy at Edinburgh, but although strongly supported, the notoriety of his sceptical opinions prevented his success. In 1746, he accepted an invitation from General St. Clair to attend him as a secretary to his expedition, which ended in an incursion on the coast of France; and, in 1747, he accompanied him in his military embassy to the courts of Vienna and Turin. During his residence at the latter place, imagining that his Treatise of Human Nature had failed of success from the manner rather than the matter, he published the first part of the work anew, under the title of an Inquiry concerning Human Understanding. Its new shape, however, made but little difference in its success; and on his return from Italy, Hume observes, 'I had the mortification to find all England in a ferment, on account of Dr. Middleton's Free Inquiry, while my performance was entirely overlooked and neglected.'

His disappointment was increased by the failure of a new edition of his Essays; but borne up by the natural cheerfulness of his disposition, he, in 1749, went to his brother's residence in Scotland, and composed his Political Discourses, and Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals, both of which were published at Edinburgh in 1752. At this time his former publications had begun to attract notice, and more than one answer had been written to his Essays, of which, however, he took no notice, having made a fixed resolution, which he inflexibly maintained, never to reply to any body. His Political Discourses were favorably received both abroad and at home, but his Principles of Morals, although, in his own opinion, incomparably the best of all his writings, came, as he says, unnoticed and unobserved into the world. In the year of its application, already mentioned, he was chosen librarian to the Faculty of Advocates, when the large library, of which he had the command, suggested to him the idea of writing the History of England, 'Being frightened,' he says, 'with the notion of continuing a narrative through a period of seventeen hundred years, I commenced with the accession of the House of Stuart; an epoch when I thought the misrepresentation of faction began chiefly to take place.' The history of this period appeared in one quarto volume, in 1754; but instead of meeting with the applause which he confesses he expected, it was assail