taining, brilliant, illuminating, and interesting. As an author, he is among the most distinguished of the eighteenth century; but the lapse of forty years has somewhat impaired his reputation for a style which is now generally admitted to be enigmatical, pompous, and elaborate, where it should have been concise, simple, and explicit. Dr. Beattie says, 'Such is the affectation of his style, that I could never get through the half of one of his volumes;' and a celebrated bishop observed of his 'bulky quartos,' that they were 'only fit for the gloom and horror of wintry storms.' None can deny to it, however, a pervading splendor, stateliness, and majesty; and, indeed, the writer seems to be always on his guard against a common expression, as if he were afraid of degrading his own powers, by descending to the level of ordinary capacities. It is thus that he has some passages of surprising and matchless beauty; and where his language is in keeping with his subject, the understanding is readily captivated, and the ear unconsciously delighted.
As to the matter of his history, the principal charges against him are the grave ones of a covert attempt to overthrow a belief in revealed religion, and a complacent indelicacy of description, especially in the latter volumes. To this he answers, that 'the licentious passages are confined to the notes, and to the obscurity of a learned language;' an apology which few, perhaps, will consider sufficient. His attack on Christianity he himself seems to have regretted, though he never retracted. 'Had I believed,' he says, 'that the majority of English readers were so fondly attached, even to the name and shadow of Christianity; had I foreseen that the pious, the timid, and the prudent, would feel, or affect to feel, with such exquisite sensibility; I might, perhaps, have softened the two invidious chapters, which could create many enemies, and conciliate few friends.' His pathetic observations at the close of his memoirs, show that his own notions offered no security for felicity here, if, as he insinuated, those of others would fail to do so hereafter. After quoting the opinion of Fontenelle, who, he observes, fixes our moral happiness to the mature season in which our passions are supposed to be calmed, our duties fulfilled, our ambition satisfied, our fame and fortune established on a solid basis, he says, 'I am far more inclined to embrace than to dispute this comfortable doctrine. I will not suppose any premature decay of mind or body; but I must reluctantly observe, that two causes, the abbreviation of time, and the failure of hope, will always tinge with a browner shade the evening of life.' In a letter to Lord Sheffield, after the death of his wife, he says, 'the only consolation in these melancholy trials to which human life is exposed, the only one at least in which I have any confidence, is the presence of a real friend.'
DAVID HUME.
This celebrated historian was born at Edinburgh, on the 26th of April,
1711. He was of a good family, both by father and mother, and the former
dying whilst he was an infant, he was brought up under the care of
his mother, whom he describes as a women of singular merit. A passion
for literature took possession of him at a very early period of his education,
and, in consequence of his sobriety and studious disposition, he was destined
by his family for the law; but 'while they fancied,' he says in his
