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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.

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135.

From DAVID HUME

Address: To Adam Smith Esqr at Kirkaldy

MS., RSE ii. 52; HL ii. 276–7.

St. Andrews Square, 24 Feb. 1773

Dear Smith

There are two late Publications here which I advise you to commission. The first is Andrew Stuarts Letters to Lord Mansfield which they say have met with vast Success in London; Andrew has easd his own Mind, and no bad Effects are to follow: Lord Mansfield is determind absolutely to neglect them.1 The other is Lord Monboddo’s Treatise on the Origin and Progress of Language,2 which is only part of a larger work. It contains all the Absurdity and malignity which I expected; but is writ with more Ingenuity and in a better Stile than I look’d for.

Surge et inhumanæ senium depone Camenæ.3 Yours

D. H.

P.S.

I shoud save you Expence, by sending you over both these works, if I knew how.

[1 ]In Letters to the Right Honourable Lord Mansfield, privately printed in Jan. 1773, Andrew Stuart attacked Mansfield in an ironic vein for his partiality in the Douglas Cause; see Letter 72, n. 1.

[2 ]The first volume of Monboddo’s book Of the Origin and Progress of Language was advertised in the Edinburgh Advertiser on 23 Feb. 1773, and in the London press on 29 March. Monboddo’s stories of cat–tailed men and the essential humanity of the orangoutang diverted the reading public, but his central thesis was an original one: ‘The matter of my Book . . . may be reduced to three heads—first, that Language is not natural to Man—second, that it is possible (for I say no more) that it may have been invented—and, lastly—upon that Supposition—to show how it was invented.’ See E. L. Cloyd, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1972), ch. iv. The sixth and last volume of the Origin was published in 1792.

[3 ]Horace, Epistles i. 18, l. 47: ‘Rise up and abandon the peevishness of the unsociable muse.’ Doubtless another exhortation to Smith to visit Hume in Edinburgh.

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

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