LANGUAGE is not yet rich in precise definitions. "What is Poetry ?"-" What is History?"-has never been satisfactorily settled; nor yet, "What is Biography?"-though some approach has been made to assign to each its province, and point out its boundaries. For our present purpose, it is sufficient to assume that the great end of Biography, is to convey a complete and accurate idea of the individual who forms its subject in his inner, and in his external life, especially as that is shaped and coloured by the society and circumstances in which he is placed. If this assumption be substantially correct, then we have, in this "Life of Hume," a satisfactory solution of the question"What is Biography?" derived from experiment. It is an inferior, though a most important element, in portraying any individual, that he may have been a statesman, a lawyer, a poet, an artist, a physician, or, like Hume, a philosopher: as to each profession there necessarily belongs a distinct set of circumstances, a different atmosphere, which must exercise a powerful influence on individual character. Keeping this in view, we are bound to say, that Mr. Burton has not only fulfilled his great first duty of anatomizing the man, David Hume, but also the subsidiary object of every biographer who thoroughly comprehends the nature of his function. He has presented us with "David Hume," and, to a considerable extent, "his Times,"-social, political, and literary. A bright and memorable era his was in the literary history of both France and Scotland; the society in which Hume moved being even more full of interest than his own life. The main object of the work is, however, the Life of Hume; and of this Mr. Burton has drawn the broad and massive outline, without omitting those smaller traits, individualities, and idiosyncrasies, which are required to give truth and life to all intellectual portraiture, while his secondary groups, and his back-grounds, harmonize and tome the picture which they enrich.

There would be implied national reproach in the life of Hume being so late of making its appearance, except for the explanation given by Mr. Burton. There have hitherto, he says, been no materials, and the reason of this will appear byand-by. He has obtained a vast mass of materials, and states, that in his work "an attempt has been made to connect together these documents, by

a narrative of events in the life of him to whom they relate; an account of his literary labours, and a picture of his character, according to the representations of it preserved by his contemporaries." Mr. Burton points out another feature of his work, which we must indicate thus early. He is, though by profession a lawyer, apparently deeply versed in the philosophical systems of his countrymen, Hume, Smith, Stewart, Brown, and others of inferior note, and conversant with the metaphysical writers of Germany. His analytic faculty may also have been sharpened, and his opinions in some measure moulded, by the inquiries and doctrines of Jeremy Bentham, for whom we believe he performed a duty somewhat similar to that which he here undertakes for Hume. Bearing this in mind, the reader may make his own of what follows from the advertisement of his book.

Though the task that was before me was simply to describe, and never to controvert, I do not profess to have avoided all indications of opinion in the departments of the work which have the character of original authorship. I have the satisfaction, however, of reflecting that the documents which are the real elements of value in this work, are impartially presented to the reader, and that nothing is omitted which seemed to bear distinctly on the character and conduct of David Hume.

It will now be satisfactory to all parties, to give the history of these new materials, the " Hume Papers," in Mr. Burton's own words.

I now offer a few words in explanation of the nature of these original documents. The late Baron Hume had collected together his uncle's papers, consisting of the letters addressed to him, the few drafts or copies he had left of letters written by himself, the letters addressed by him to his immediate relations, and apparently all the papers in his handwriting, which had been left in the possession of the members of his family. To these the Baron seems to have been enabled to add the originals of many of the Smith, Blair, Mure, and others. The design with which letters addressed by him to his intimate friends, Adam this interesting collection was made, appears to have been that of preparing a work of a similar description to the present; and it is a misfortune to literature that this design was not accomplished. On the death of Baron Hume, it was found that he had left this mass of papers at the uncontrolled disposal of the Council of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. This learned body, after having fully considered the course proper to be adopted in these circumstances, determined that they would permit the papers to be made use of by any person who might enjoy their confidence. Having for some desirous to apply them to a legitimate literary purpose, time indulged in a project of writing a life of Hume,

VOL. XIII.-NO. CXLVII.

postponed from time to time, on account of the imperfect character of the materials at my disposal, I applied to the Council of the Royal Society for access to the Hume papers; and after having considered my application with that deliberation which their duty to the public as custodiers of these documents seemed to require, they acceded to my request.

The Life compiled from these voluminous materials, is pre-eminently that of a philosopher; and we think that it goes far to establish, of the great Metaphysician, what is universally allowed of the great Poet-that he must be born. Little or

nothing is known of the childhood or boyhood of our "born" philosopher, though it may safely be assumed, that as soon as he was capable of thought,

his intellect must have taken that direction in which it is found confirmed before he was out of

his teens. A life of this eminent person-this born philosopher, if ever one existed-is therefore a desideratum not only in British literature, but in the history of universal mind, of the progress made by the human understanding in the pursuit of abstract, as well as of practical truth. We have seen above that the Hour was come, and the Man has not been wanting, if a thorough appreciation of the character and social position of Hume, a clear comprehension of his works, with indefatigable, nay, we should say excessive, pains in research and investigation may qualify for the assumed task.

It had long, we have seen, been the laudable ambition of Mr. Burton to write the memoirs of his illustrious countryman, and he makes graceful acknowledgments, both to the gentlemen having the care of the Hume Papers, and to some of the most eminent of the Scottish literati, for the frank kindness with which they have lent him assistance and advice, and the warm encouragement which they have given to his undertaking. From this feeling, besides the mass of papers bequeathed to the Royal Society by the late Baron Hume, he has obtained access to several valuable collections of unpublished, private, and confidential letters, and in particular to the correspondence of Hume with Sir Gilbert Elliot, which has been got from his descendant the Earl of Minto, and a series of letters addressed to Colonel Edmondstoune, an accomplished friend whom Hume acquired, while Secretary to General St. Clair. Of the materials already before the world, but scattered through hundreds of obscure volumes and pamphlets, French and English, Mr. Burton has made that diligent use, which would make one regret to see so much labour often bestowed to obtain very small results, save for the consolation, that as the careful biographer must drudge through these toils, the labour may in this as in other cases be found its own sufficient reward. It is not the value of the game, but the pleasure and excitement of running down the quarry.keeping in view our narrow space, and the amplitude of the subject, it is time that we approached the actual book, the two well-filled volumes. As a Life of Hume, it would be imperfect, if not stark naught, without a minute account of his different works, whether metaphysical, ethical, or historical. But to analyze each of Hume's productions would not only have been impracticable, within moderate

-But

bounds, but might, if done, have overlaid and smothered the intended biography, and would also, we are persuaded, have grievously disappointed every class of readers. Some may think that in this department Mr. Burton has even gone too far. Hume's philosophy must be studied in his own works; but his biographer has ably and succinctly characterized each separate production, and sometimes indulged in disquisition, if not in controversy, so far as to point out inconsistencies or flaws in argument, detected either by himself or by other inquirers. How this has been accomplished, we shall endeavour byand-by to show, as much of the strength and individual character of the "Life," are found in these brief argumentative or critical passages.

David Hume was born in Edinburgh, in 1711. He was the younger of the two sons of Hume or Home, of Ninewells, a Berwickshire estate of probably many more acres than then yielded pounds sterling apiece to the Laird. He was a remote and by what was then a common arrangement offset of the great Eastern Border family of Home; among Scottish gentlemen, wore the long robe, though rather as an ornament than a habiliment, as lairds seldom had much practice. Mr. Burton has availed himself of the Philosopher's labours in making out the pedigree of the Ninewells family, of which it is enough that David Hume, beyond all dispute, belonged to the "gentle blood" of his country, and felt it; and it is even alleged, but not proved, that he was not very fond of meeting, on the then narrow pavé of Edinburgh, a cousin, a baker in the Canongate, who might probably have claimed equal propinquity to the Earls of Home. Mr. Burton is astonished at the entire absence of poetic or historical associations in Hume, and at the want of any tender or of any stirring reminiscences of his childhood, which the romantic localities of Ninewells must have called forth in most minds. Of that period of Hume's life, his biographer can only speak, not from what is known, but from what is wanting. All that Hume has supplied is, that his father, "who passed for a man of parts," died when he was an infant; and that his mother, a young and handsome woman, was “of singular merit,” and devoted herself entirely to the care of her children. he may probably have attended the parish school Of his early education nothing is known, though of Chirnside, and the High School of Edinburgh ; and it is almost certain that he studied at the University of Edinburgh till he was about fourteen or fifteen. A letter written to a friend when he could not have been much older, might, Mr. Burton concludes, from its grave and high-toned philosophical feeling, be fancied an ambitious young student's imitation of this lofty vein, had not the writer been Hume, of whom his biographer says:

Through the whole of the memorials of Hume's early feelings, we find the traces of a bold and far-stretching literary ambition; and though he believed that he had seared his mind to ordinary human influences, it was because this one had become so engrossing as to overwhelm all others. "I was seized very early," he tells us, in his own life," "with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life, and a great source of my enjoyments." Joined to this impulse,

We shall find that Hume viewed mankind as an anatomist rather than as a philanthropist ; yet we like to see a biographer set out with a hearty liking, and even a small bias, for his hero.

Mr. Burton gives us the fruits of his own unwearied pains, in extracts from essays and fragments found among the Hume Papers, which he refers to a very early period; and one of which, "An Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour," is certainly a very remarkable paper for a youth, containing many indications of the writer's peculiar cast of thought in after life, and worthy of being given to the world in full.

So steady, grave, and industrious a youth as Hume, was considered by his relations quite cut out for the legal profession; but society will always have lawyers enough, and it was fortunate for mankind that Hume was seduced from law by "philosophy and general learning;" although the biographer asserts, what cannot be gainsaid, that Hume possessed all the elements of which a good lawyer is made; and that he has, besides, examined very creditable legal documents drawn up by him without any technical training.

A very remarkable revelation of Hume, the devoted young student, and indeed the Hume of all future time, has been discovered by Mr. Burton among the miscellaneous papers, and is here printed in full. It is a voluminous letter, addressed "To a Physician," who is conjectured to be Dr. Cheyne. This gentleman united considerable attainments in mental philosophy with high reputation and great professional knowledge, and, as the author of a work on the English Malady,' or the "spleen,” as hypochondria was then termed, was just the man to attract the confidence of a young philosopher, whose devotion to study, and neglect of exercise and recreation, had slightly injured his health, and, as he far more feared, impaired his intellectual powers. Though he could still, as he told the Doctor, doggedly plod on, he felt unfitted for the higher or more sustained flights of genius. This curious epistle, the "Confessions of a Student," was probably never sent, and the advice craved consequently never given. Hume's patrimony, as the younger son of a small Scottish laird a century since, was necessarily very trifling; so he was compelled to try a more active course of life; and at Bristol, in a very few months, or we may infer weeks, he found that the business of a merchant was even more unsuited to him than law; so, as he himself narrates,

"I went over to France, with a view of prosecuting my studies in a country retreat; and I there laid that plan of life, which I have steadily and successfully pursued. I resolved to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my

independency, and to regard every object as contemptible, except the improvement of my talents in literature."

This is the clew to every part of Hume's subsequent career.— -He liked the people, and spent several years in different towns in France, in nearly uninterrupted study; and here, in solitude and privation, he received that bias of character and of taste in pursuit which made him the thinker and the man which he continued to be to the end of life. The miracles then worked at the tomb of the Abbé Paris, the Jansenist saint, and the conversations of the Jesuits of Rheims and of La Flêche, in requiring a young man of the acute intellect of Hume to believe too much, drove him into confirmed scepticism. He tells himself how it was; and in doing so indirectly points out the pervading mischiefs of superstition. Mr. Burton says,—

We find from a letter to Principal Campbell, that two of these years were spent at La Flèche, and that he had some communication with the members of the Jesuits' College there. He says, It may perhaps amuse you to learn the first hint, which suggested to me that argument which you have so strenuously attacked. I was walking in the cloisters of the Jesuits' College of La Flêche, a town in which I passed two years of my youth, and engaged in a conversation with a Jesuit of urging some nonsensical miracle performed lately in some parts and learning, who was relating to me, and their convent, when I was tempted to dispute against him; and as my head was full of the topics of my Treatise of Human Nature, which I was at that time composing, this argument immediately occurred to me, and at last he observed to me, that it was impossible for I thought it very much gravelled my companion; but that argument to have any solidity, because it operated equally against the Gospel as the Catholic miracles ;— which observation I thought proper to admit as a sufficient answer. I believe you will allow, that the freedom at least of this reasoning makes it somewhat extraordinary to have been the produce of a convent of Jesuits, though perhaps you may think the sophistry of it savours plainly of the place of its birth.”

In France, Hume composed his "Treatise of Human Nature," which he came over to London to print. He was now twenty-six years of age; but his vocation was fixed to "Divine Philosophy;" and he was, at all times, animated by that ardent literary ambition which, at first sight, appears not very consonant with the phlegmatic character usually assigned to him, - Mr. Burton, indeed, repeatedly labours to show how unjustly assigned. Hume's ambitions and passions were certainly not of the ordinary kind; but they were energetic and animating principles, strongly and habitually felt. The young author was naturally filled with anxiety, not alone about the fortunes, but the worth of his production; mistrustful, and desirous of the cool judgment of friends. To how many works and projects might his words apply!

My own opinion I dare not trust to; both because it concerns myself, and because it is so variable, that I know not how to fix it. Sometimes it elevates me above and fears; so that, whatever be my success, I cannot be the clouds; at other times it depresses me with doubts entirely disappointed.

Mr. Burton has gone very fully into the history and character of the first great work of a great philosopher,—a work which Hume himself appears to have regretted, nay, disclaimed-and, perhaps, at

her own weakness and nakedness, and supplies her with no extrinsic support or protection. Such a work, coming from a man at the time of life when our sympathies with the world are strongest, and our anticipations brightest, would seem to indicate a mind rendered callous by hardship and disappointment. But it was not so with Hume. His coldness and isolation were in his theories alone; as a man he was frank, warm, and friendly. But the same impulses which gave him resolution to adopt so bold a step, seem at the same time to have armed him with a hard contempt for the opinions of the rest of mankind. Hence, though his philosophy is sceptical, his manner is frequently dogmatical, even to intolerance; and while illustrating the feebleness of all human reasoning, he seems as if he felt an innate infallibility in his own. He afterwards regretted this peculiarity; and in a letter, written apparently at an advanced period of life, we find him deprecating not only the tone of the Inquiry, but many of its opinions.

From MS. notes or common-place books kept by Hume in the earlier part of his life, Mr. Burton gives various extracts. Some of these memoranda embody facts and information afterwards used in "Smith's Wealth of Nations," and the biographer remarks that

intercourse with an Elliot, a Mure, an Edmondstoune, an Elibank, a Macdonald, an Oswald, Hume was exchanging ideas with men not unworthy of literary fellowship with a mind even so highly cultivated as his own.

William Mure of Caldwell, who was in 1761 made a Baron of the Exchequer in Scotland, was among those who seem to have earliest secured and longest retained Hume's esteem. The letters which passed between them are not often dated, but the circumstances under which many of them are written are attested by internal evidence.

Hume was by this time thirty-three years of age, and his means of life as small as at twentythree; for, whatever might be the reputation of his books among the chosen few, their sale was as slow as at the first. He therefore made an attempt to obtain a professorship in the Edinburgh University; but this, and also the hope of the appointment of tutor to the son of Mr. Murray of Broughton, failed, for the reasons here given—

"The accusation of heresy, deism, scepticism, atheism, &c. &c. &c., was started against me; but never took, being bore down by the contrary authority of all the

We copy out one of those sayings which is not in the common vein of the historian of the Stuarts: "Nations much oftener err from too great respect to governments than from too little." This must be Smith's saying, not Hume's.

Mr. Burton gives an accurate and chronological account of the appearance of each of Hume's works. Never, for many years, was there a more unfortunate author. His first work fell deadborn from the press, and his second and third were not much more successful. He printed his "Moral and Political Essays" in Edinburgh instead of London; and it is worthy of remark that, as he either erased or altered most of the passages in the second part of his "History of the Stuarts," which breathed any thing like democratic opinions, or a leaning to the popular party, so he ordered one of the most noble passages in his Essay on Liberty of the Press," to be wholly expunged. Among the most useful of the biographer's labours is his careful collation of the various editions of Hume's works, by which he detects and exhibits his frequent alterations and erasures, particularly in the "History of England." These erasures, we regret to say, are rarely to the credit of the philosopher's liberality of opinion, where popular principles and interests are concerned.

"The

Mr. Burton makes a very fair if not flattering estimate of the intellectual character and general accomplishments of the Scottish gentry of the middle of the last century, whose intellectual superiority he attributes in some degree to the practice of the youth of Scotland being then sent to study at foreign universities; and he establishes this opinion by reference to the epistolary correspondence of the friends of Hume. The conversation of Hume's friends, he says, we have unfortunately lost

For there was no Boswell at his elbow. But their letters show how much of scholarship, and elegant literature, and philosophy, slumbered in the minds of the Scottish gentry of that age; and assure us that in his

tremely, was to find that this accusation was supported Mr. Leechman, who, 'tis said, agreed that I was a very by the pretended authority of Mr. Hutcheson, and even unfit person for such an office. This appears to me absolutely incredible, especially with regard to the latter gentleman. For, as to Mr. Hutcheson, all my friends think that he has been rendering me bad offices to the utmost of his power."

Francis Hutcheson, Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, had been among the warmest of his literary friends, and so had Mr. Leechman, then a popular clergyman; but, as Mr. Burton remarks,—

It may easily be imagined that both Mr. Hutcheson and Dr. Leechman would be opposed to the appointin one of the universities; and that they might entertain ment of David Hume as a teacher of moral philosophy this opinion along with an honest admiration of his character, and an appreciation of the value of his talents when exercised in another sphere. It is at all events gratifying to find, that whatever opposition Hutcheson may have made, he was influenced by no sordid motive, as he was offered the chair, and refused it.

And thus was the "honour of philosophy" vindicated in Hume's eyes, though we hear no more of his correspondence with Hutcheson. Blair, Robertson, and some of the more celebrated clergymen of the Church of Scotland, were, however, until his death, among the most intimate friends and constant correspondents of Hume; but the tie was literature and social qualities, religion being an interdicted topic.

A story rashly circulated by The Quarterly Review, asserting that the Hume Papers showed the Scottish clergy of the age of Hume to have been a set of hypocritical sceptics and scoffers, is triumphantly refuted by Mr. Burton, who has examined all the documents and correspondences, and also by the gentlemen forming the Council of the Royal Society, who performed the same duty, and found nothing whatever to give colour to such an accusation.

The residence of Hume with the Marquis of Annandale forms an unpleasant episode in his history. This unfortunate person was in that condition of mental health which makes the