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“The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Cœsar to the Abdication of James the Second, 1688. By DAVID HUME, Esq. A new edition, with the Author’s last corrections and improvements. To which is prefixed a short account of his life, written by himself. Vols. I, II, III. New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 82 Cliff Street. New Haven: T. H. Pease. 1850,” The New Englander, vol. 8, no. 30 (May 1850), pp. 322–3.
Anonymous
The New Englander was begun by Edward Royall Tyler who edited the magazine until his death in 1848. In 1850, when the review of Hume reprinted below was published, the New Englander was conducted by the “New Englander Association,” a group which, like Tyler, was centered in Yale College. Although it was primarily a religious magazine, its contents were far ranging. On The New Englander see API, p. 156; Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741–1850 (Cambridge, 1938), pp. 312–15.
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HUME’S History is a proof at once of the potency and the impotency of good writing. Hume was a Tory; Hume was a Deist; Hume was fond of sly insinuations against purity and piety; and yet, Hume’s history is read by every body, by Whig as well as by Tory, by Americans as well as by Englishmen. But, although almost every one derives his first knowledge of English history from Hume, yet the charm of his style has not been potent enough permanently to distort the transactions which he records or the characters of the personages whom he describes. The ultimate opinion of the majority of his readers, at least in this country, and we think in England, is not far from correct as to the great events and the great men of English history.
This edition is to be followed in quick succession by similar editions of Gibbon and Macaulay. We are not displeased at the conjunction, though no three historians are more unlike. Each has great excellencies, but as it respects the manner in which the several histories are composed, we give the decided preference to Hume’s history. Between the style of Hume, and of Gibbon and Macaulay, there is, as it seems to us, all that difference which exists between nature and art, or, perhaps, we should rather say, between art which has become natural, and the merely artificial.
The volumes are well printed and on good paper; but we must not omit to mention — what in our ignorance of book-publishing, seems little short of a miracle, — that the volumes are sold at thirty cents each, and the whole number of volumes is to be only six.