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LETTER XV.: On‘accommodating’ the different Parts of the History. - David Hume, Letters of David Hume to William Strahan [1756]

Edition used:

Letters of David Hume to William Strahan, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888).

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LETTER XV.

On‘accommodating’ the different Parts of the History.

[March, 1762.]

Dr Sir,

I return you thanks for the favourable Sentiments you express, in which I am sensible there is great Partiality; a Circumstance, however, which renders them the more obliging. I do not expect ever to live and see the Completion of your Prophecy.1.

I send you the second Volume of the Stuarts2. Mr. Millar tells me, that he intends to throw off a small Number of 250 to compleat the Sets; and at the same time a larger number of 750, on Medium paper, which he intends likewise for a new Edition of the Tudors and this antient History. Now I am going to propose to you an Improvement, if it be practicable. I always intended, that the whole six Volumes shoud be printed and shoud read as one continued Work, and that the Chapters shoud go on without Interruption from beginning to end. In that Case, the first Chapter of James I, is the forty fifth of the whole. Could you not therefore without any difficulty alter the Types for the last 750 Copies, so as to accommodate the Work to this Alteration. There needs only to change the beginning of the Chapter & the marginal Title, which may be done without Trouble. Unless this be done at present, I do not know when we shall be able to bring them to an Uniformity3. .

I am Dear Sir Yours sincerely

David Hume.

[1.]Note 1. What was the nature of the prophecy I have not been able to ascertain.

[2.]Note 2. Hume wrote to Millar on March 15, 1762:—’I am running over both the ancient history and the Tudors, and shall send you them up by the wagon as soon as they are corrected. Please tell Mr. Strahan to keep carefully this copy I send up, as well as that which I left of the Stuarts; for if you intend to print an octavo edition next summer, it will be better to do it from these copies which are corrected than from the new edition, where there will necessarily be some errors of the press.’ Burton's Hume, ii. 130. The copy which he tells Millar he is sending up is no doubt‘the second volume of the Stuarts’ mentioned in the letter to Strahan. It is not‘the ancient history’ or‘the Tudors,’ for both of these he is correcting, nor one of the volumes of‘the Stuarts,’ which he had left in London corrected on his visit in 1761. It must therefore be the second volume, and the letter must have been written at the same time as the one to Millar.

[3.]Note 3. Hume wrote to Millar on March 18, 1764:—’I shoud be glad to know how your new Method of publishing Volume by Volume has succeeded.’ M.S.R.S.E. Whether he is speaking of the edition of his own History in eight volumes published in 1763, or of some other book, I do not know.

The first uniform edition of the History was that of 1763 in 8 vols. octavo; in 1770 a quarto edition was published, also in 8 vols.