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“THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND, from the invasion of JULIUS CÆSAR to the Abdication of JAMES THE SECOND, 1688. By DAVID HUME, Esq. Boston: PHILLIPS, SAMPSON AND COMPANY.” The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, vol. 34, no. 3 (September 1849), p. 257.
Anonymous
The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine was founded in 1833. By 1849, under the editorship of Lewis Gaylord Clark (1810–78), the readership for “Old Knick” was extensive. On Clark see Evert A. Duyckinck and George L. Duyckinck, eds., Cyclopaedia of American Literature (reprinted Philadelphia, 1965), vol. 2, pp. 400–402. On the Knickerbocker see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 606–14.
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THIS new edition, which is well executed in a typographical point of view, contains the author’s last corrections and improvements in the history proper, together with an account of his life, written by himself. Of the history itself nothing is now required to be said. It has passed the ordeal of contemporary as well as later criticism, and has long been considered a model of simple yet graceful and comprehensive literary composition. The brief memoir of the writer’s life, written by himself, is a delightful piece of autobiography; and as we perused it, we pencilled a few sentences which, with our readers’ permission, we shall proceed to lay before them. Speaking of the lack of success of some of his first attempts at authorship, HUME says: ‘Such is the force of my natural temper, that these disappointments made little or no impression on me.’ In relation to the attacks which were made upon one or two of his works upon moral themes, he observes: ‘I had a fixed resolution, which I inflexibly maintained, never to reply to any body; and not being irascible in my temper, I have easily kept myself clear of all literary squabbles. I was ever more disposed to see the favorable than unfavorable side of things; a turn of mind,’ he adds, ‘which it is more happy to possess than to be born to an estate of ten thousand a year.’ In 1763, HUME was attached to the English embassy at Paris; and he thus bears his testimony to the attractions of the gay capital: ‘Those who have not seen the strange effects of modes, will never imagine the reception I met with at Paris from men and women of all ranks and stations. The more I resiled from their excessive civilities, the more I was loaded with them. There is, however, a real satisfaction in living at Paris, from the great number of sensible, knowing and polite company with which that city abounds above all places in the universe.’ If we may take for veritable HUME’S exposition of himself, he was a man of mild disposition, of command of temper, of an open, social and cheerful humor, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all his passions. Even his love of literary fame, his ruling passion, never soured his temper, notwithstanding his frequent disappointments. He wholly escaped the baleful tooth of calumny, and never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of his character or conduct. He was for some time aware of the existence in his person of a mortal and incurable disease, and he reckoned, he tells us, upon a speedy dissolution; and yet he never suffered a moment’s abatement of his spirits. An excellent engraved portrait of HUME, by Sir JOSHUA REYNOLDS, fronts the title-page. One can hardly help fancying, while surveying carefully the expression of the features, that the original was a man of at least sinister sentiments; and it would be scarcely too much to assume, from this prima facie evidence, that he was a confirmed skeptic.