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103.: To 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.


103.

To DAVID HUME

  • Address: To David Hume Esqr, Under Secretary for the Northern department, at Mr Secretary Conways house, London

MS., RSE vii. 36 (sheet torn); Rae 241–2 (in part).

Kirkaldy, 7 June 1767

My Dearest friend

The Principal design of this Letter is to Recommend to your particular Attention the Count de Sarsfield,1 the best and the most agreable friend I had in france. Introduce him, if you find it proper, to all the friends of your absent friend, to Oswald and to Elliot in Particular. I cannot express to you how anxious I am that his stay in London should be rendered agreeable to him. You know him and must know what a plain, worthy honourable man he is. I have enclosed a letter for him which you may either send to him or rather, if the weighty affairs of state will permit it, deliver it to him yourself. The letter to Dr Morton2 you may send by the Penny Post.

My Business here is Study in which I have been very deeply engaged for about a Month past. My Amusements are long, solitary walks by the Sea side. You may judge how I spend my time. I feel myself, however, extremely happy, comfortable and contented. I never was, perhaps, more so in all my life.

You will give me great comfort by writing to me now and then, and by letting me know what is passing among my friends at London. Remember me to them all particularly to Mr Adams’s family3 and to Mrs. Montague.4

What has become of Rousseau? Has he gone abroad, because he cannot continue to get himself sufficiently persecuted in Great Britain?5

What is the meaning of the Bargain that your Ministry have made with the India Company?6 They have not, I see prolonged their Charter, which is a good circumstance. What are you going to do, or rather [ ]

[1 ]Count de Sarsfield, of Irish extraction; for a time it was thought he would succeed M. de Guerchy as Ambassador to Britain in 1767, but he did not. Hume knew him well; see Letter 104 from Hume, dated 13 June 1767.

[2 ]Charles Morton (1716–99), M.D. Leyden, 1748; practised in London; F.R.S. 1751, Secretary to the Royal Society 1760–74; Under–Librarian of the British Museum 1756, Secretary to the Trustees and Principal Librarian 1776, succeeding Dr. Maty. His chief work was an edition of Whitelock’s Embassy to Sweden (1772).

[3 ]? that of the architects, Robert Adam (1728–92) and James Adam (1732–94), boyhood friends of Smith in Kirkcaldy. In 1763 they returned to London after studies in Rome and on the Grand Tour which completed an education begun through apprenticeship under their father William.

[4 ]Mrs. Elizabeth Robinson Montagu (1720–1800), bluestocking and enthusiastic admirer of Ossian; visited Scotland in 1766; from 1750, her London house was much frequented by intellectuals; contributed to Lyttleton’s Dialogues of the Dead (1760) and attacked Voltaire in An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespear (1769).

[5 ]Rousseau was back in France by this time.

[6 ]Both the Government and the Opposition sought to make friends in East India House: reform was in the air but not so seriously as to affect the fortunes being made, e.g. by Robert Clive. Chatham’s ministry extracted £400,000 a year, and simultaneously limited the dividend to 10 per cent. If the dividend fell below 6 per cent, the Company was not obliged to pay the subsidy. See L. S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth Century Politics (London, 1952).