Econlib

The Library

Other Sites

 Front Page arrow Titles (by Subject) arrow 283.: To EDWARD GIBBON - Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence Vol. 6 Correspondence of Adam Smith

Return to Title Page for Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence Vol. 6 Correspondence of Adam Smith

Search this Title:

283.: To EDWARD GIBBON - 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.


283.

To EDWARD GIBBON

  • Address: Edward Gibbon, Esqr, Lausanne

MS., BM Add. 34,886, fol. 168v; Gibbon’s Miscell. Wks. (1814), ii. 429 (misdated); Rae 414 (in part, misdated).

Edinburgh, 10 Decr. 1788

My Dear Friend

This Letter will be delivered to you by Mr Hugh Cleghorn Professor of History in the University of St Andrews.1 He is my particular and intimate friend, and is besides married to a very near relation of mine.2 He accompanies upon his travels the Earl of Home,3 the Chief of our friend Davids family, and a young man, I have every reason to believe, of very amiable and agreable manners. May I beg leave to recommend most earnestly both Pupil and Tutor to your best advice and protection.

I have ten thousand appologies to make for not having long ago returned you my best thanks for the very agreable present you made me of the three last Volumes of your History.4 I cannot express to you the pleasure it gives me to find, that by the universal assent of every man of taste and learning, whom I either know or correspond with, it sets you at the very head of the whole literary tribe at present existing in Europe. I ever am, my Dear friend, most affectionately yours

Adam Smith

[1 ]Hugh Cleghorn (? 1751–1836), Professor of Civil History, St Andrews, 1773–93. During the later years of his professorship, Cleghorn travelled a great deal on the Continent, and after 1793 he was employed on secret service by the British Government. He formed a friendship with the Count de Meuron, proprietor and Colonel of a Swiss regiment that formed the main part of the Dutch garrison of Ceylon. With Henry Dundas’s support Cleghorn travelled to Ceylon with de Meuron in 1795 and secured the transference of the regiment to British service, thus setting in train the annexation of Ceylon to the British Empire. From 1798 to 1800, Cleghorn was Colonial Secretary of Ceylon, but he resigned as the result of conflicts with the Governor, Lord North. He bought the estate of Stravithie, Fife, after returning from the East; was elected Captain of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, St Andrews 1802; and became the friend of Sir Walter Scott who wrote of him in the last diaries as an able man who had seen much and spoke well: see the Revd. William Neil, ed., The Cleghorn Papers (London, 1927).

[2 ]In 1774 Cleghorn married Rachel MackGill who came from Kemback, Fife.

[3 ]Alexander, 10th Earl of Home (1769–1841), succeeded his father 1786; representative peer for Scotland 1807; Ld. Lt. of Berwickshire; md. Elizabeth, 2nd dau. of the 3rd Duke of Buccleuch 1798. As the heir of the Dunglass branch, he was ‘Chief’ to all Homes, including the Ninewells branch.

[4 ]Vols. iv, v, vi of the Decline and Fall were published on 8 May 1788. In the last volume (Ch. 61, n. 72), Gibbon paid tribute to the Scottish school of historical thinkers: ‘On this interesting subject, the progress of society in Europe, a strong ray of philosophic light has broke from Scotland in our own times; and it is with private, as well as public regard, that I repeat the names of Hume, Robertson, and Adam Smith.’