.

NN. enterprize.”

It is truly remarkable that, twenty-five years after he had begun writing on the early Stuart reigns, and on this eighth comprehensive revision of his work, Hume should find so much to amend.

Apart from these substantive revisions, the 1778 edition also displays throughout Hume’s fastidious concern over insignificant “trifles”—as seen, for example, in the single leaf in the set (volume II, signature I8, pages 127–28) cancelled and replaced, PLL v6.0 (generated September, 2011)

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probably at Strahan’s direction, to represent some authorial correction overlooked on first printing. (Reference here is to the paragraph introducing the variant, volume I, pages 476–477 of this reprint).

Paragraph 1773

1778

Such was

granted by his laws ordained

The king

intitled

entitled

The escheats revenue to the king revenue

But besides lands

land

″ ″

Where he sold

If he sold

Passing over the subtleties involved in this phraseology, we may agree that the minuscule specimen here scrutinized sufficiently establishes the general practice.

With this demonstration there can be little doubt that the present issue necessarily must reproduce the posthumous 1778 edition. The reprint here presented, from copies at the Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, and the Boston Public Library, now however extends to six volumes only: an arrangement which for the first time allows the final text to be recast according to Hume’s original design of three

“epochs.” When for merely commercial reasons that grand concept was abandoned in the eight-volume 1763–1778 editions, all semblance of Hume’s construction was lost.

There Henry VII entirely and the initial chapter of Henry VIII were abruptly cut away from the Tudors and huddled in with the last of the Ancients. There too, among the Stuarts, both Charles I and Charles II were also dismembered, each being split between two volumes. Hume reluctantly acquiesced in this typographical butchery, insisting only that the divisions not occur within a chapter. Were he present now to witness his best text in its best form, an ideal state unobtainable in his own day, he would surely commend what the Liberty Fund has here accomplished. The only difficulty would be to restrain him from transforming this classic in historiography into yet another version!

william b. todd

26 April 1982

William B. Todd is The Mildred Caldwell and Baine Perkins Kerr Centennial Professor in English History and Culture at the University of Texas at Austin.

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[Back to Table of Contents]

THE LIFE OF DAVID HUME, ESQ.

WRITTEN BY HIMSELF

MY OWN LIFE

It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore, I shall be short. It may be thought an instance of vanity that I pretend at all to write my life; but this Narrative shall contain little more than the History of my Writings; as, indeed, almost all my life has been spent in literary pursuits and occupations. The first success of most of my writings was not such as to be an object of vanity.

I was born the 26th of April 1711, old style, at Edinburgh. I was of a good family, both by father and mother: my father’s family is a branch of the Earl of Home’s, or Hume’s; and my ancestors had been proprietors of the estate, which my brother possesses, for several generations. My mother was daughter of Sir David Falconer, President of the College of Justice: the title of Lord Halkerton came by succession to her brother.

My family, however, was not rich, and being myself a younger brother, my patrimony, according to the mode of my country, was of course very slender. My father, who passed for a man of parts, died when I was an infant, leaving me, with an elder brother and a sister, under the care of our mother, a woman of singular merit, who though young and handsome, devoted herself entirely to the rearing and educating of her children. I passed through the ordinary course of education with success, and was seized very early with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life, and the great source of my enjoyments. My studious disposition, my sobriety, and my industry, gave my family a notion that the law was a proper profession for me; but I found an unsurmountable aversion to every thing but the pursuits of philosophy and general learning; and while they fancied I was poring upon Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the authors which I was secretly devouring.

My very slender fortune, however, being unsuitable to this plan of life, and my health being a little broken by my ardent application, I was tempted, or rather forced, to make a very feeble trial for entering into a more active scene of life. In 1734, I went to Bristol, with some recommendations to eminent merchants, but in a few months found that scene totally unsuitable to me.