Hume and the Scottish Shakespeare

Abstract

DA VID HUME was proud of his ability to maintain close personal friendships among the Moderates of the Scottish clergy. As one of their numberi expressly testifies, He took much to the company of the younger clergy, not from a wish to bring them over to his opinions, for he never attempted to overturn any man's principles, but they best understood his notions, and could furnish him with literary conversation' The not undistinguished names of Hugh Blair, Alexander Carlyle, Adam Ferguson, John Home, William Robertson, and Robert Wallace were among those closely associated with his. This association of clergy and infidel was the more seemly in a day when the leading clergy were of letters, and when also it was a professed principle of Hume's that men of letters ought always to regard their sympathy of taste as a more powerful band of union, than any difference of party or opinion as a source of animosity:2 Yet it was Hume's intimacy with the Rev. John Home that involved him in a controversy surpassed in intensity only by the later, more famous one with Rousseau. The Rousseau quarrel, however, was purely personal and essentially trivial, while the Douglas affair, under a superficial frivolity, was national, religious, and essentially serious. The personal relationship that drew Hume into the Douglas controversy, nevertheless, must not be entirely overlooked, for it was deeply founded. The spirit of that intimacy has been caught in a vignette of Laurence Sterne's in A Sentimental Journey: A prompt French Marquis at our ambassador's table demanded of Mr.