a distance the scenes of court-intrigue and party-plotting which had so long distracted our country; and certainly tended to revive not only agricultural enterprise but the love of literature, both of which had been trodden under foot in the turmoil of civil commotion. Between the days of Buchanan, when Scottish scholarship was proverbial over Europe, and the middle of the last century, we can hardly boast of a name even respectable in letters. No doubt, it was the quiet lull after the storms of the Commonwealth, the Restoration, and the Revolution, which fostered the seeds that were so soon to ripen into glorious harvest, to produce Hume, Smith, and Robertson-three names as potential as any that bear sway in the republic of philosophy. How that soil, so cultured, and sending forth such first-fruits, has since continued to bear golden grain, we need not stop to recall. The real blessings of the Union, however, were the ultimate results of it. For the time the picture has a reverse, and one not agreeable to contemplate. We cannot say that the study of our recent Scottish history -that is, of the two last centuries-rouses much national pride within us. No doubt, in the middle and lower classes of the Scotch there has always been something of the heroic; and they have always found worthy leaders among some of the landown ers and the aristocracy. Still, from the wars of Montrose to the days of the volunteers, there has always been a dash of subserviency among the upper classes of our land-the union of the Crowns commenced it. The nobles of our proud but poor court of Holyrood quailed before the contemptuous riches of the English aristocracy. The fear of English scorn struck deeper to their hearts than English steel had ever done, and the rough and daring soldier, who had no higher ambition than to ride foremost in the foray at the head of his family retainers, was tamed down, amid strangers who derided his poverty, and sneered at his mothertongue, into an uncouth but supple and pliant follower of courts, What the union of the Crowns commenced, the union of the Kingdoms completed; and we know few passages in the history of any country so little creditable to their manliness and independence, as that of the upper classes in Scotland for the century which followed that event. It is quite true, we gained dur ing that period a great deal in which we had formerly been wofully deficient. Some of the arts of peace made way among us, where they had been long neglected-cattle-lifting was exchanged for agriculture, and some degree of English comfort and propriety took the place of our instinctive and national uncleanness. Far be it from us to disparage the boon-but we paid a large price. The removal, first of our Court, and then of our Parliament, made English manners the test of fashion, and Scotland during the Seventeenth Century. 543 English satire the dread and bugbear of our gentry. Successful, by the national strength of intellect, perseverance, and caution, which have enabled Scotchmen everywhere to rise above the difficulties, and surmount the barriers which a foreign country impose on a stranger, they grew ashamed of the land of their birth in proportion as they acquired honour in that of their adoption. Thus the manlier spirit of ruder times was exchanged for the subservient arts which were productive of place and patronage. Disliked by the neighbours into whose councils and courts they intruded, their pliancy and homage to the great became proverbial, and gave a tone to the character of Scotchmen from which, even at this day, they have hardly recovered. On the other hand, they were prized in their own country just in proportion as they had interest at the fountain of honour and profit, power to promote, or patronage to bestow. Thus, however politics varied, or popular feeling tended in England, Scotland, with all its Jacobite tendency, was ever on the side of the Crown; and it is a singular relic of the spirit of the times, that the man whose name in England was identified with popular resistance to power, still remains in Scotland as a legend of reproach, and that John Wilkes is as regularly burned in effigy among us, when the 5th of November comes round, as his gunpowder prototype in the sister country. These causes operated, partly by assimilation and partly by contrariety, two important effects on the character of the Scottish gentry. English fashions led them to despise the old sturdy Presbyterianism of their ancestors, and English Whiggery provoked them to secret Jacobitism, and favour for the doctrines of arbitrary power. Latitudinarians in religion, and Tories in politics, were the Scottish lairds of that generation. The first of these results was one very injurious to the nation. The great body of the people never gave in to the lukewarm principles of the diluted Church of Scotland; and for many a long day, while philosophy so-called ruled the Church, the people were fed beyond its pale. This was perhaps the most grievous effect that followed the incorporation of the kingdoms. Its tendency was to sever those who had an ambition to be in the mode, and who were accessible to the influence of the ridicule of their southern neighbours, from the unflinching and truehearted mass of the people. The latter retained, while the first were all anxious to get free of, the Puritan strictness of the century before. Those whose ancestors had signed the Covenant in defiance of lawless power, and maintained by their sword, and sealed with their lives the charter to which they had set their hand, were only anxious to prove how little they were enslaved by the narrow prejudices of their forefathers, and how well jus tified they were, by freedom of thought, and laxity of tone, to mingle with the less strait-laced gentry of the sister kingdom. We are satisfied that this feeling had quite as much to do as French influence or French philosophy, with the rapid revolution which took place in Scotland during the eighteenth century, among the higher classes, in religious principle:-in making this mere profession of evangelical belief unfashionable, and a subject of ridicule, and ultimately in leading a large proportion of the men of eminence among us, whether in the Church or out of it, some to a practical and others to an avowed career of cold morality, or absolute disbelief. We are not even now free of this great social evil. It would have been well for Scotland, even in these later times, if more of her nobility and landowners had not ceased from the faith of their ancestors, and embraced the forms, and professed the ritual of the more aristocratic Church of England. It is not easy to express the scorn with which any right-minded man must view such an influence when acted on in a question so solemn ; and yet it is too true, that the mere notion of it being the more genteel and gentleman-like ritual-that is to say, the creed professed by our richer neighbours, has not been without its effect in leading many among us, whose very names are household words in the history of the old struggles for the faith, to abandon a cause which lies as deep as ever in the hearts of the people. The strange state of feeling thus produced largely operated in the late convulsions in our Church. Our rulers would not have stood amazed as they did, when the memorable scene of May 1843 took place, had they not imagined that principles to which so many of the great and wealthy of our land were hostile or indifferent, could hardly be of any firm or abiding influence with the people. The result proved their error; but it has proved also another much more important and alarming fact-it has shown how far removed the classes of society in this country are from each other, and how little sympathy subsists between the higher ranks, and the body of the people. The spirit of 1640 burns as brightly among the latter now, as it ever did in the days when they worshipped on the hill-side, with their carabines beside them; and we own we look forward with no little anxiety to the results of the daily widening of that breach which the Union unquestionably commenced. The other element which we mentioned, namely the political, is also a singular and remarkable feature in the history of Scotland after the Union. The old leaven of Jacobite predilection was a spirit quite distinct. It was a remnant of the old Scottish feeling of clanship, and was much more respectable, though more dangerous, than the subservient Toryism which succeeded Birth and Education. 545 it. But there grew up in Scotland a certain abstract love of the Crown, and of its powers and prerogatives, which had its origin quite as much in antagonism to English notions of liberty, as in any fixed principle of government. The English sneered at Scotchmen-envied their preferment among them, and cried up liberty. In return, the Scotch resented the indignities they met with, and showed their sense of past and future favours by crying up the Crown. The Jacobite spirit, which led the Scotch to fraternize with Bolingbroke against Sir Robert Walpole, merged into that which rallied the whole nation round Lord Bute, against Junius and Wilkes. A more complete amalgamation of the countries has, however, happily obliterated all traces of this adverse influence, which for so many years stifled the voice of liberty among us. While it lasted, it bore bitter and even bloody fruits; but it is pleasant to reflect that few now would have the courage to profess or even to defend it, : We have glanced at these topics, because we think the traces of both elements are clearly discernible throughout the whole of Hume's career. The first found only too much sympathy in his cool and doubting temperament. The second worked deeply within him for no man felt the influence more deeply, or was more galled by the stings of English haughtiness and disdain. We believe that the better-half of Hume's love of kingly power, and hatred of popular rights, arose from his hearty and retributive dislike of the English community. His pride could not brook their sneers at his Scottish dialect, and their general aversion to his nation; and in revenge he set himself to pull down their household gods, and to decry that liberty on which their pride was so much set. There is little told us of much consequence about Hume's early years. He was born in 1711, being the second son of the Laird of Ninewells, in East Lothian-a family of considerable antiquity. Mr. Burton has printed a letter from Hume himself to Mr. Home of Whitfield in 1758, in which he gives a very minute and detailed account of his pedigree. About the orthography of his name he was more jealous than beseemed a philosopher— insisting on spelling it Hume, as the ancient and accurate nomenclature, and abhorring the Home of his friend and relative Henry Home of Kaimes, as much as Johnson did to be Scotticized into Johnston. Nothing of any note seems to have marked his career at school or college; and it is not known with certainty where he was educated. Indeed, it does not appear that he ever acquired any critical acquaintance with the dead languages. He had little Latin and less Greek, in scholarly sense; and in the quotations which occur in his correspondence, he sets both grammar and prosody frequently at defiance. It is how VOL. VII. NO. XIV. 2 M ever certain that he read Latin with ease, and in his after years became very well acquainted with most authors in that language. He says himself, that for the Essay on the Populousness of Ancient Nations, he read through most of the Classical writers. He seems very early to have evinced a taste for the study of Mental Philosophy. Mr. Burton gives us the scroll of a letter to a college friend, in which, at the age of sixteen, he writes,— "You say that I would not send in my papers, because they were not polished nor brought to any form: which you say is nicety. But was it not reasonable? Would you have me send in my loose incorrect thoughts? Were such worth the transcribing? All the progress that I made is but drawing the outlines, on loose bits of paper: here a hint of a passion; there a phenomenon in the mind accounted for in another the alteration of these accounts: sometimes a remark upon an author I have been reading; and none of them worth to any body, and I believe scarce to myself. For the perfectly wise man, that outbraves fortune, is surely greater than the husbandman who slips by her; and, indeed, this pastoral and saturnian happiness I have in a great measure come at just now. I live like a king, pretty much by myself, neither full of action nor perturbation-molles somnos. This state, however, I can foresee is not to be relied on. My peace of mind is not sufficiently confirmed by philosophy to withstand the blows of fortune. This greatness and elevation of soul is to be found only in study and contemplation-this can alone teach us to look down on human accidents. You must allow [me] to talk thus, like a philosopher; 'tis a subject I think much on, and could talk all day long of. But I know I must not trouble you. Wherefore I wisely practise my rules, which prescribe to check our appetite," &c. There is also a fragment of an essay on chivalry and modern honour, written about the same date, from which our readers may be well pleased to have an extract, as showing the manner in which, at that early age, he treated a subject very nearly akin to some of his more mature speculations : ""Tis observable of the human mind, that when it is smit with any idea of merit or perfection beyond what its faculties can attain, and in the pursuit of which it uses not reason and experience for its guide, it knows no mean, but as it gives the rein, and even adds the spur, to every florid conceit or fancy, runs in a moment quite wide of nature. Thus we find, when, without discretion, it indulges its devote terrors, that working in such fairy-ground, it quickly buries itself in its own whimsies and chimeras, and raises up to itself a new set of passions, affections, desires, objects, and, in short, a perfectly new world of its own, inhabited by different beings, and regulated by different laws from this of ours. In this new world 'tis so possessed that it can endure no interruption from the old; but as nature is apt still on every occasion to recall it thither, it must undermine it |