Thomas Gray. BORN A. D. 1716.—DIED A. D. 1771. THIS eminent poet was born in Cornhill, London, on the 26th of December, 1716. His grandfather was a considerable merchant; but his father, though he also followed business, is stated to have been of an indolent and reserved temper, so that he rather diminished than increased his paternal fortune. Young Gray received his grammatical education at Eton, under Mr Antrobus, his mother's brother; and, when he left school, entered a pensioner at Peterhouse, Cambridge. While he was at Eton he contracted a particular intimacy with Horace Walpole, and with Richard West, whose father was lord-chancellor of Ireland. When he had been at Cambridge about five years—where he took no degree, because he intended to profess the common law-Horace Walpole invited him to travel with him as his companion. He accepted the invitation, and they arrived at Amiens on the first of April, 1739. Mr Gray's letters contain a very pleasing account of many parts of their journey; but unfortunately, at Florence, Walpole and he quarrelled and parted. Mason-to whom we are chiefly indebted for the materials of our author's life-says, that he was enjoined by Walpole to charge him with the chief blame in their quarrel, candidly confessing that "more attention and complaisance,-more deference to a warm friendship, to superior judgment and prudence,-might have prevented a rupture that gave much uneasiness to them both, and a lasting concern to the survivor." In the year 1744 a reconciliation was effected between them by a lady who wished well to both parties. After their separation Mr Gray continued his journey in a manner suitable to his own limited circumstances, with only an occasional servant. He returned to England in September, 1741, and in about two months after buried his father, who had, by injudicious waste of money upon a new house, so much lessened his fortune that Gray thought his circumstances too narrow to enable him, in a proper manner, to prosecute the study of the law. He therefore retired to Cambridge, where he soon after became bachelor of civil law; and where, as Dr Johnson expresses it," without liking the place or its inhabitants, or pretending to like them, he passed, except a short residence at London, the rest of his life." 6 In 1742 Gray wrote his 'Ode to Spring,' his Prospect of Eton College, and his 'Ode to Adversity.' He began likewise a Latin poem, De Principiis Cogitandi.' He wrote, however, very little, though he applied himself very closely to his studies. In 1750 he published his celebrated Elegy, written in a Country Churchyard,' which first made him known to the public. In 1753 several of his poems were splendidly published, with designs by Mr Bentley. In 1756 some young men of the college, whose chambers were near his, diverted themselves with disturbing him by frequent and troublesome noises. This insolence, having endured it a while, he represented to the governors of the college; but finding his complaint little regarded, he removed to Pembroke-hall. In 1757 he published The Progress of Poetry,' and 'The Bard.' This year he had the offer of the poetlaureateship, but declined it. Two years after, he quitted Cambridge for some time, and took an apartment near the British museum, where he resided near three years, reading and transcribing. In 1765 he undertook a journey into Scotland. In 1768, without his own solicitation, or that of his friends, he was appointed regius-professor of modern history in the university of Cambridge. He lived three years after this promotion, and died on the 31st of July, 1771. He was The poems of Gray are few in number, but they possess a very high degree of merit. A complete edition of them, with memoirs of his life, including many of his letters, was published by his ingenious friend. Mason. Gray was one of the most learned men in Europe.. He was well-acquainted both with the elegant and profound sciences. extensively read in every branch of history, both natural and civil; had read all the original historians of England, France, and Italy; and was a great antiquarian. Criticism, metaphysics, morals, politics, made a principal part of his study; voyages and travels of all sorts were his favourite amusements; and he had a fine taste in painting, prints, architecture, and gardening. His greatest defect was an affectation in delicacy, or rather effeminacy, and a visible fastidiousness, or contempt and disdain of his inferiors in science. He also had in some degree that weakness which disgusted Voltaire so much in Congreve. Though he seemed to value others chiefly according to the progress they had made in knowledge, yet he could not bear to be considered himself merely as a man of letters; and though without birth, or fortune, or station, his desire was to be looked upon as a private independent gentleman, who read for his amusement. Some of the poems of Gray have been treated with great critical arrogance and injustice by Dr Johnson; but they have been ably defended by several ingenious writers. Perhaps one reason that induced Johnson to attack Gray's poems with so much severity was, that he had obtained great reputation, though he was a Cambridge man; for such prejudices, however absurd, are known to have operated on the mind of Johnson. David Hume. BORN A. D. 1711.-DIED A. D. 1776. THIS celebrated metaphysician, moralist, and historian, was a Scotsman by descent and birth. He was born at Edinburgh in 1711. There was some noble blood in his ancestral line on both sides,-a circumstance of which, in spite of his philosophy, he was always extremely vain. His juvenile years, says his biographer, Mr Ritchie,' were not marked by any thing very noticeable. His father died while he was yet an infant, leaving the care of his three children to their mother, a lady of considerable prudence, who, Mr Ritchie says, acquitted herself in this charge with very laudable assiduity, although it appears, from her son's own confession, that his religious education had been so greatly Account of the Life and Writings of David Hume, Esq. by T. E. Ritchie. London: 1807. neglected in childhood that he had only a very slight acquaintance with the New Testament. Being a younger brother, and possessing only a very slender patrimony, he was urged to apply himself to the study of law, on his finishing his academical course; but although his studious disposition, his sobriety, and his industry, gave his family a notion that the law was a proper profession for him, he had already imbibed tastes and feelings of little congeniality with the profession thus designed for him. "I found," says he, "an insurmountable 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."2 The patrimony of a younger Scottish brother, however, would not allow of entire devotion to a life of letters, without some sources of emolument greater considerably than literature at that period presented to the young aspirant. "My very slender fortune," he says, "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. I went over to France with a view of prosecuting my studies in a coun- · try 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. During my retreat in France, first at Rheims, but chiefly at La Fleche, in Anjou, I composed my Treatise of Human Nature.' After passing three years very agreeably in that country, I came over to London in 1737. In the end of 1738, I published my Treatise, and immediately went down to my mother and my brother, who lived at his country-house, and was employing himself very judiciously and successfully in the improvement of his fortune." He speaks apparently with much equanimity of the signal failure of his first performance, and he deserves commendation certainly for the good hope he maintained in a crisis so discouraging to every literary adventurer as that through which it was his lot to pass. But there is a curious note subjoined to Mr Ritchie's account of this portion of our philosopher's life, which gives another representation altogether of the affair. In the London Review,'3 edited by Dr Kenrick, there is a note, says Mr Ritchie, on this passage in our author's biographical narrative, "rather inimical to the amenity of disposition claimed by him. The reviewer says: 'so sanguine, that it does not appear our author had acquired, at this period of his life, that command over his passions of which he afterwards makes his boast. His disappointment at the public reception of his Essay on Human Nature had indeed a violent effect on his passions in a particular instance; it not having dropt so dead-born from the press but that it was severely handled by the reviewers of those times, in a publication entitled "The Works of the Learned,"'—a circumstance which so highly provoked our young phi 2 Autobiography prefixed to History of England.' losopher that he flew in a violent rage to demand satisfaction of Jacob Robinson, the publisher, whom he kept, during the paroxysm of his anger, at his sword's point, trembling behind the counter lest a period should be put to the life of a sober critic by a raving philosopher.' ” We cannot present the next ten years of Hume's life in fewer words than his own. After affirming that he very soon recovered from the blow thus inflicted on him, and renewed the prosecution of his studies with great ardour, he proceeds thus: "In 1742 I printed at Edinburgh the first part of my Essays: the work was favourably received, and soon made me entirely forget my former disappointment. I continued with my mother and brother in the country, and in that time recovered the knowledge of the Greek language, which I had too much neglected in my early youth. In 1745 I received a letter from the marquess of Annandale, inviting me to come and live with him in England; I found also, that the friends and family of that young nobleman were desirous of putting him under my care and direction, for the state of his mind and health required it.-I lived with him a twelvemonth. My appointments during that time made a considerable accession to my small fortune. I then received an invitation from General St Clair to attend him as a secretary to his expedition, which was at first meant against Canada, but ended in an incursion on the coast of France. Next year, to wit, 1747, I received an invitation from the general to attend him in the same station in his military embassy to the courts of Vienna and Turin. I then wore the uniform of an officer, and was introduced at these courts as aid-de-camp to the general, along with Sir Harry Erskine and Captain Grant, now General Grant. These two years were almost the only interruptions which my studies have received during the course of my life: I passed them agreeably, and in good company; and my appointments, with my frugality, had made me reach a fortune, which I called independent, though most of my friends were inclined to smile when I said so: in short, I was now master of near a thousand pounds. I had always entertained a notion, that my want of success in publishing the Treatise of Human Nature,' had proceeded more from the manner than the matter, and that I had been guilty of very usual indiscretion, in going to the press too early. I therefore cast the first part of that work anew in the Inquiry concerning Human Understanding,' which was published while I was at Turin. But this piece was at first little more successful than the Treatise of Human Nature.' my return from Italy, I had the mortification to find all England in a ferment, on account of Dr Middleton's Free Inquiry,' while my performance was entirely overlooked and neglected. A new edition, which had been published at London, of my Essays, moral and political, met not with a much better reception. Such is the force of natural temper, that these disappointments made little or no impression on me. I went down in 1749, and lived two years with my brother at his countryhouse, for my mother was now dead. I there composed the second part of my Essays, which I called Political Discourses,' and also my 'Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals,' which is another part of my Treatise that I cast anew. Meanwhile my bookseller, A. Millar, informed me that my former publications (all but the unfortunate Treatise) were beginning to be the subject of conversation; that the sale of them was gradually increasing, and that new editions were demanded. 6 On Answers by reverends and right reverends came out two or three in a year; and I found by Dr Warburton's railing, that the books were beginning to be esteemed in good company. However, I had a fixed resolution, which I inflexibly maintained, never to reply to any body; and not being very irascible in my temper, I have easily kept myself clear of all literary squabbles. These symptoms of a rising reputation gave me encouragement, as I was ever more disposed to see the favourable than unfavourable side of things; a turn of mind which it is more happy to possess, than to be born to an estate of £10,000 a year." Whatever may be the literary merit and acuteness of the publications noticed in the above extract, they contain sentiments highly repugnant to every serious and well-disposed mind, as calculated to overturn the first principles of reasoning and belief, and establish only a universal scepticism in the room of all philosophy. Their object is not to show the difficulties and uncertainties which impede knowledge, but to prove that real and certain knowledge is a thing which mortals need not seek after, for it is rendered unattainable to man by the very structure of his understanding. The foundation of this annihilating scepticism had been incautiously laid long before Hume's time, by a no less distinguished and excellent man than John Locke, who, in his celebrated essay, limited all our sources of knowledge to sensation and consciousness; and by representing ideas as actual existences lodged in the mind, resolved every thing into mere consciousness, or the mind's perceptions of itself, and of nothing beyond itself. Hume was but following out this doctrine to its legitimate though startling and absurd consequences, when he chose to deny the existence of an external world, and to reject the universally-received ideas of causation and the uniformity of the laws of nature. It is not to be wondered at that men less irascible than Warburton should have railed at the propounder of such monstrous dogmas as those which Hume had set forth. The gen eral assembly of the Church of Scotland for a time meditated a prosecution of the author of the Enquiries;' but were fortunately diverted from a proceeding which would only have defeated its object, by bringing a wretched philosophy into more general notice, and investing its author probably with the attributes of a martyr, and the sympathies which always attach themselves more or less to a persecuted man. 6 "In 1751," Mr Hume resumes, "I removed from the country to the town, the true scene for a man of letters. In 1752 were published at Edinburgh, where I then lived, my 'Political Discourses,' the only work of mine that was successful on the first publication. It was well received abroad and at home. In the same year was published at London, my Inquiry concerning the Principles of Morals;' which, in my own opinion, (who ought not to judge on that subject,) is of all my writings, historical, philosophical, or literary, incomparably the best. It came unnoticed and unobserved into the world. In 1752 the Faculty of Advocates chose me their Librarian, an office from which I received little or no emolument, but which gave me the command of a large library. I then formed the plan of writing the History of England;' but being frightened with the notion of continuing a narrative through a period of seventeen hundred years, I commenced with the accession Autobiography prefixed to History of England.' |