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20.: From DAVID HUME - Adam Smith, Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence Vol. 6 Correspondence of Adam Smith [1740]

Edition used:

Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross, vol. VI of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987).

Part of: The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith, 7 vols.

About Liberty Fund:

Liberty Fund, Inc. is a private, educational foundation established to encourage the study of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.


20.

From DAVID HUME

  • Address: To Mr Adam Smith Professor at Glasgow

MS., RSE ii. 27; HL i. 216–17.

Edinburgh, 9 Jan. 1755

Dear Sir

I beg you to make my Compliments to the Society,1 and to take the Fault on Yourself, If I have not executed my Duty, and sent them this time my Anniversary Paper. Had I got a Week’s warning, I shou’d have been able to have supply’d them; I shou’d willingly have sent some Sheets of the History of the Commonwealth or Protectorship; but they are all of them out of my hand at present, and I have not been able to recall them.

I think you are extremely in the right, that the Parliaments Bigotry has nothing in common with Hiero’s Generosity.2 They were themselves violent Persecutors at home to the utmost of their Power. Besides, the Hugonots in France were not persecuted; they were really seditious, turbulent People, whom their King was not able to reduce to Obedience. The French Persecutions did not begin till sixty Years after.

Your Objection to the Irish Massacre3 is just; but falls not on the Execution but the Subject. Had I been to describe the Massacre of Paris, I should not have fallen into that Fault: But in the Irish Massacre no single eminent Man fell, or by a remarkable Death. If the Elocution of that whole Chapter be blameable, it is because my Conception labord with too great an Idea of my Subject, which is there the most important. But that Misfortune is not unusual. I am Dear Sir

Yours most sincerely

David Hume.

[1 ]The Literary Society of Glasgow, founded by Smith and others connected with the University. Hume, Sir John Dalrymple, and the Foulis brothers were among the members: see D. D. McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement: A Survey of Eighteenth–Century Clubs and Societies (Washington State University Press, Pullman, 1969).

[2 ]? Hiero (Hieron) II, Tyrant of Syracuse, 270–216 b.c. See Theocritus xvi, and Polybius, i.8.viii.

[3 ]Hume gave an account of the Irish Massacre of 1641 in vol. i, ch. vi, of his History.