ART. VI. Over-Population and its Remedy; or, an Inquiry into the Extent and Causes of the Distress prevailing among the Labouring Classes of the British Islands, VII.-I. Des Pensées de Pascal. Rapport à L'Académie Française sur la nécessité d'une nouvelle édition de cet ouvrage. Par M. V. Cousin. 2. Pensées, Fragments, et Lettres de Blaise Pascal: publiés pour la première fois conformément aux 3. De la Liberté du Travail. Par Charles Dunoyer. 4. Notes of a Traveller on the Social and Political State of France, Prussia, &c. By Samuel Laing, 161 ib. II.-1. Lives of the English Saints. Parts I. to XII. III.-1. A Brief Sketch of the Life of the late Miss Sarah Martin of Great Yarmouth: with Extracts from the Parliamentary Reports on Prisons; and her own VI-A Brief Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frank- taken from the principal Works of the greatest Painters. Drawn and Engraved by Thurmer, X.-1. Report of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the Consolidation of the Statute Law. Printed 2. Substance of a Speech delivered by the Right Hon. Henry Lord Langdale, Master of the Rolls, in the House of Lords, on the 13th June 1836, on the second reading of the Bill for the better Adminis- tration of Justice in the High Court of Chancery. XI.-1. Correspondence relating to the Marriages of the Queen and Infanta of Spain. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of her Majesty, 2. Documens communiqués aux Chambres dans la Ses- sion de 1846-1847, par le Ministre des Affaires Etrangères-Mariages Espagnols. 3. Speech of the Duc de Broglie in the Chamber of 4. Speech of M. Guizot in the Chamber of Peers, 5. Speech of M. Guizot in the Chamber of Deputies, 6. Considerations respecting the Marriage of the Duke THE EDINBURGH REVIEW, JANUARY, 1847. No. CLXXI. ART. I.-Life and Correspondence of David Hume. From the Papers bequeathed by his Nephew to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and other Original Sources. By JOHN HILL BURTON, Advocate. 2 vols. 8vo. Edinburgh: 1846. DA AVID HUME was born at Edinburgh in 1711; and died there in 1776. It is worth while to stop for a moment, and recollect what was the state of Scotland at the two periods. Scotland had been singularly late in cultivating the arts of peace-literature among the rest. In 1711 she was just entering on her new existence. Up to the union of the two crowns, her history is little better than a chronicle of factious outbreaks and ferocious daring; which other parents, as well as Arnold, may often have been unwilling to let their children read-lest the only tales the Grandfathers of Scotland had to tell, should give them too bad an opinion of human nature. Buchanan was her only scholar of note-though she had vernacular poets of no mean mark, in Gawin Douglas, Dunbar, and Sir David Lindsay. The grounds upon which Hume himself finally decided against the authenticity of the Poems of Ossian was, the impossibility of any man of sense imagining that they should have been orally preserved, 'during 'fifty generations, by the rudest, perhaps, of all European nations; the most necessitous, the most turbulent, and the most ' unsettled.' The hundred years which divides the union of the two crowns and that of the two kingdoms, brought with them only a change, or an aggravation, of miseries. Scotland was VOL. LXXXV. NO. CLXXI. A then no place for a man of letters-or humanity. The provincial government of the Stuarts proved as intolerable to Leighton as to Burnet. Leighton at last threw up his bishopric in despair, and withdrew to England; after having declared that he could not concur in planting the Christian religion itself, by such instruments; much less a form of Church government. Such was the inheritance to which the eighteenth century succeeded. Andrew Fletcher, a classical republican (of the Virginian and Carolinian caste,) was for reducing the body of the people into slavery, as an indispensable foundation for better times. Instead of this administrative experiment, political necessities gave us, providentially, a union of the two kingdoms. The social advantages which have followed in its train, were probably little thought of at the time: But as soon as Scotland had become an integral part of the British Empire, she appears to have at once discovered her latent capabilities and powers; and to have perceived that the perfervidum ingenium Scotorum (their ancient character) might carry them as far in the arts of peace as in those of war. In spite of two Jacobite rebellions, and of the occasional longings, more national than patriotic, of a few impracticable politicians, for a separate parliament, Scotland sprang a-head. During the following century, she not only got far in advance of Ireland, (which lagged behind, swamped in claret and jobbing,) but turned all the great elements of civilization to as fortunate an account as England herself. Hume, when a child, might have gazed, as it spread its sails for its first voyage, on the first Clyde-built vessel ever sent across the Atlantic by Glasgow merchants. But before his death, Glasgow had become one of the first commercial cities in the empire; and a second capital was rising at Edinburgh, to which Hume invited his friends to come and see him, in our New Town,' and challenged a comparison with any thing they had seen in any part of the world. An improving agriculture, a rapidly extending trade, and good parochial schools, were converting the serf-population of Andrew Fletcher into useful citizens. Under the encouragement of men ike Lord Kames and Oswald, (both of them Hume's intimate friends,) the progress of agriculture and of trade was watched and aided by the higher intelligence of the country: while a literary circle, of which Hume was the centre figure, made the period they adorned the Augustan age of Scotland. A slight set-off, for a time, is not at all inconsistent with these immense advantages. The air and manners of its now untravelled gentry may have fallen off a little,-something of the sort is said to have been observed by Marshal Keith on his return to Scotland: But the breeding which he missed had been all exotic-as |