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ABSTRACT
David Hume (1711–1776) believed a ‘confederacy of authors’, brought together by the notoriously pugnacious William Warburton (1698–1779), were his most consistent and scurrilous critics. Warburton and his ‘School’ were Hume’s bêtes noires and embodied so much of what he fought against. Only there is reason to believe that the ‘Warburtonian School’ was more a useful fiction than a historical reality. The following deep dive into Humeana and the ‘stuff of anecdote’ digs up substantial conclusions about Hume’s philosophical project and context. Any glorifying picture of Hume admirably ignoring sustained ‘Warburtonian’ name-calling is not an accurate description of the early reception of his writings. Hume did respond – at least, occasionally, privately and publicly. Moreover, the ‘Warburtonian School’ does not seem to exist – at least, it did not exist if it is taken to refer to a coherent group of writers, numbering more than two, concerned with attacking Hume. The response to Hume of ‘Warburtonians’ who can be identified was varied, disparate, and often positive. Warburton even came to like Hume’s historical writings. Hume’s claim that such a School existed may have led to the post hoc creation of the School in the minds of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commentators.
Acknowledgements
The research for this article was supported by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Research Fellowship. I am grateful to Kerenza Davis, Barnaby Crowcroft, James Harris, and Tim Stuart-Buttle for constructive criticism on earlier drafts. I am especially grateful to Felix Waldmann for inviting me to contribute to this special issue and for his commentary on an initial draft, and I apologise to him for ending up writing about Hume’s enemies rather than his friends.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 David Hume to Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, [September 1766], The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), Letter No. 351. Hereafter Hume Letters.
2 The focus of the following article discusses the reception of Hume’s writings. Hume, famously, engaged publicly with Rousseau in 1766. The Affair between the two was a battle over each philosopher’s personal actions during Rousseau’s brief exile in England and not their respective writings. As such, it does not inform my discussion here. An overview of the Affair can be found in Robert Zaretsky and John T. Scott, The Philosophers’ Quarrel: Rousseau, Hume, and the Limits of Human Understanding (New Haven, NJ: Yale University Press, 2009).
3 Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England 1727–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). On the myriad meanings of politeness see Lawrence E. Klein, ‘Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century’, The Historical Journal 45 no. 4 (2002): 869–98. My emphasis here is on how individuals within public forums could engage in philosophical, literary, or religious debate.
4 See Lawrence E. Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
5 William Wake, State of the Church and Clergy of England … historically deduced (London: Sare, 1703), i.
6 Anon., ‘Art. II. The Advantage and Necessity of the Christian Revelation … by John Leland’, The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature. vol. 19 (1765), 247–56 (247).
7 Isaac Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature (London: Murray, 1791), 247.
8 William Warburton to Richard Hurd 25 May 1763, in William Warburton, Letters from a Late Eminent Prelate to One of His Friends, 2nd ed. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1809), 346.
9 William Warburton, The Doctrine of Grace, 3rd ed. (London: Millar and Tonson, 1763) quoted in Brian W. Young, Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 168.
10 A.W. Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians: A Study in Some Eighteenth-Century Controversies (London: Oxford University Press, 1932).
11 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in L’Eta dei Lumi: Studi Storici Sul Settecento Europeo in Onore di Franco Venturi, 2 vols. (Naples: Jovene Editore, 1985), I:523–62; Young, Religion and Enlightenment. Warburton appears only infrequently in J.G.A. Pocock’s Barbarism and Religion, 6 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999–2015), e.g. V:230–7 and VI:184–6, 317–8.
12 Warburton to Hurd 2 November 1759, Late Eminent Prelate, 220. On Warburton see Young, Religion and Enlightenment, 167–212; Sorkin, Religious Enlightenment, 23–66; Robert G. Ingram, Reformation Without End: Religion, Politics and the Past in Post-Revolutionary England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), Part IV. Another important discussion is John Robertson, The Case for the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 280–8.
13 David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 64. Compare: Adam Rounce, ‘“A Clamour Too Loud to be Distinct”: William Warburton’s Literary Squabbles’, The Age of Johnson, vol. 16 (2005): 199–217.
14 James Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
15 At least in his writings: eighteenth-century anecdote collections and memoirs are full of surprised statements about how Warburton’s character in private was the antithesis of his authorial persona.
16 Quoted in Young, ‘Warburton’.
17 Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 5:230.
18 Edward Gibbon, Memoirs of My Life (London: Penguin Classics, 1984), 149.
19 Young, ‘Warburton’.
20 St. James’s Chronicle 3 July 1781.
21 Hurd to Mason, 2 January 1795, in The Correspondence of Richard Hurd and William Mason: And Letters of Richard Hurd to Thomas Gray, ed. E.H. Pearce and L. Whibley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932), No. 42.
22 An equally prominent nineteenth-century perspective, however, stressed the idiosyncrasy of Warburton’s writings and his status as an outsider only belatedly and grudgingly accepted into an initially suspicious church establishment in the 1760s. For a helpful summary of both see Ingram, Reformation Without End, 267–9.
23 Henry Thomas Buckle, ‘England-For Introduction’ in Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works of Henry Thomas Buckle, ed. Helen Taylor, 3 vols. (London: Longsman, Green and Company, 1872), I:202–214 (206).
24 Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (London: Chapman and Hall, 1843), 209.
25 Leslie Stephen, Eighteenth Century Thought, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder and Company, 1876), I:345.
26 Anon., ‘Art. IV. Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Right Rev. Richard Hurd’, The North British Review, vol. 34 (1861): 195–208 (207).
27 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Friend, No. 2 (8 June 1809).
28 James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols (London: Dilly, 1791), II:86.
29 David Dalrymple, The Address of Q. Sept. Tertullian, to Scapula Tertullus, Proconsul of Africa (Edinburgh: Murray and Cochrane, 1790), 108–9.
30 George Horne, An Apology for Certain Gentlemen in the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1756), 25.
31 Anon., Impartial Remarks Upon the Preface of the Reverend Dr. Warburton (London: Cooper, 1758), 26.
32 William Kenrick, A Review of Dr Johnson's New Edition of Shakespeare (London: Payne, 1765), 89. See also James Burgh, Political Disquisitions, 3 vols. (London: Dilly, 1774–1775), II:106; Maurice Morgann, An Essay on the Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff (London: Davies, 1777), 73; Thomas Tyers, An Historical Rhapsody on Mr. Pope (London: Cadell, 1782), 50; Robert Heron, Letters of Literature (London: Wilkie, 1785), 109.
33 John Graham, The Religious Establishment in Scotland Examined upon the Protestant Principles (London: Cadell and Balfour, 1771), 287.
34 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Volume the second (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1781), 395; ‘Aecus’, ‘An Apology’, 18 June 1787, The Weekly Entertainer vol. 9 (1787), 577–84 (582); John Disney, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Arthur Ashley Sykes (London: Johnson, 1785), 264; Thomas Edwards, The Predictions of the Apostles concerning the End of the World (Bury St Edmonds: Rackham, 1790), 3; Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature, 247; George Chalmers, A Supplemental Apology for the Believers in the Shakspeare-papers (London: Egerton, 1799), 605; The Book of Job; Translated from the Hebrew, trans. Elizabeth Smith (Bath: Crutwell, 1810), 213.
35 John Evans, An Excursion to Windsor in July 1810 (London: Sherwood, Neely, and Jones, 1817), 146. See, similarly, Joseph Priestly, Theological and Miscellaneous Works of Joseph Priestley, ed. John Towill Rutt, 25 vols (London: Tegg 1817–1832), XVIII:298.
36 E.g. Vicesimus Knox, Essays Moral and Literary, 4th ed., 4 vols. (London: Dilly, 1784), II:111; Philip Parsons, Six Letters to a Friend, on the Establishment of Sunday Schools (London: Becket, 1786), 40.
37 Anon., ‘Review: The Works of the Right Rev. Wliliam Warburton, D. D.’, The Quarterly Review (June 1812), 383–407 (383).
38 See Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2006), 44–61, from which the following paragraph is heavily derived. There are many other thoughtful discussions but see, most recently, Tim Milne, The Testimony of Sense: Empiricism and the Essay from Hume to Hazlitt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
39 David Hume, Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, new ed., 2 vols. (London: Cadell, Donaldson, and Creech, 1777), ‘Advertisement’.
40 David Hume, ‘My Own Life’ (1777), Para. 9, Hume Texts Online, https://davidhume.org/texts/mol/ (Accessed 19 April 2020).
41 Robert Traill, The Qualifications of Decorum of a Teacher of Christianity Considered (Aberdeen: Chalmers and Thomson, 1755), 11; Hume to Robert Traill 21 December 1755, in Felix Waldmann, ‘Additions to Further Letters of David Hume’, Hume Studies (forthcoming), §2 No. 3.
42 Traill’s response, in turn, was conciliatory and stated that ‘there are few, I believe, who have higher notions of your talents as a writer and penetration as a philosopher, than I have’. See Traill to Hume, [December 1755]. Sotheby’s (London), Listing: English literature, history, science, children’s books and illustrations (9 July 2018), lot 307. I owe this reference to Felix Waldmann. Hume would write disparagingly of Traill, following his death, that Traill ‘knows now whether there be any truth in those doctrines, which he taught, and of which he did not believe a world while alive’ and that his teaching as Professor of Divinity at Glasgow ‘sent away all the Students of Divinity very zealous bigots’. See Hume Letters, Nos. 510 and 509.
43 Hume to Turgot [September 1766], Hume Letters, No. 351.
44 Harris, Hume, 2.
45 Harris, Hume, 23–4.
46 Harris, Hume, 2.
47 I owe both these references to James Fieser, ‘Hume’s Concealed Attack on Religion and His Early Critics’, Journal of Philosophical Research, vol. 20 (1995): 83–101 (88).
48 Traill, Qualifications, 10.
49 On the earlier strategies of ‘freethinkers’ see, for example, David Berman, ‘Disclaimers as Offence Mechanisms in Blount and Toland’, in Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter and David Wootton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 255–72; James A. Herrick, The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1997); Daniel C. Fouke, Philosophy and Theology in a Burlesque Mode: John Toland and “The Way of Paradox” (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2007).
50 Hume to William Strahan 25 June 1771, Hume Letters, No. 456.
51 Hume, ‘My Own Life’, Para. 13.
52 Hume to Turgot, [September 1766], Hume Letters, No. 351.
53 ‘Confederacy’ in Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London: Knapton, Longman, Hitch and Hawes, 1755), I:442.
54 Hume to Turgot, [September 1766], Hume Letters, No. 351.
55 John Stewart, ‘Some Remarks on the Laws of Motion’, in Essays and Observations, Physical and Literary 2 vols. (Edinburgh: Hamilton and Balfour, 1754–56), 70–140 (116–7).
56 Hume to John Stewart, 25 February 1754, Hume Letters, No. 91.
57 Hume to Hugh Blair [autumn 1763], Hume Letters, No. 188.
58 Richard Price, Four Dissertations (London: Millar and Cadell, 1768), v.
59 Hume to Richard Price 18 March 1767, New Letters of David Hume, ed. by Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), No. 126.
60 Hume to Adam Smith Thursday 12 April 1759, Hume Letters, No. 165.
61 Hume to William Rouet 15 May 1759 and 6 July 1759, Hume Letters, Nos. 166, 168.
62 William Tytler, An Historical and Critical Enquiry into the Evidence Produced by the Earls of Murray and Morton against Mary, Queen of Scots (London: Gordon, 1760), 42–50.
63 See the lengthy explanation of Tytler’s misuse of Hume’s scholarship in David Hume to Patrick Murray, Fifth Lord Elibank n.d. [late 1759/early 1760], Hume Letters, No. 172.
64 Hume to Sir Alexander Dick, 3rd baronet [née Cunyngham] 26 August 1760, New Letters, No. 31. My italics.
65 David Hume, History of England, 8 vols. (London, 1770), V:534.
66 Samuel Jackson Pratt, Curious Particulars and Genuine Anecdotes Respecting the Late Lord Chesterfield and David Hume (London: Kearsley, 1788), 2–3. In its October 1783 review the European Magazine and London Review positioned Tytler as the clear victor of this battle.
67 Tytler, An Historical and Critical Enquiry, 3rd ed. (London: Drummond, 1772), 384–5.
68 Ernest Mossner’s suggestion that Warburton was the author of review of Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40) in The History of the Works of the Learned (1741) is professedly speculative and will not be dealt with here. See Ernest C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume, second edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 123–4, 617–8.
69 Warburton to Hurd 28 September 1749, Late Eminent Prelate.
70 William Warburton, Julian: Or, A Discourse Concerning the Earthquake and Fiery Eruption, Which Defeated the Emperor’s Attempt to Rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem (London: Knapton, 1750) 94, 123; William Warburton, A Selection of Unpublished Papers, ed. by Francis Kilvert (London: Nichols and Son, 1841), 311–5.
71 Warburton, Julian, 123–4.
72 Warburton to Philip Doddridge 15 June 1750, Letters to and from the Rev. Philip Doddridge, ed. Thomas Stedman (Shrewsbury: Eddowes, 1790), 207.
73 Alexander Pope, The Works of Alexander Pope, 9 vols., ed. William Warburton (London: Knapton, Lintot, Tonson and Draper, 1751), III:222.
74 Hume to Stewart, 25 February 1754, Hume Letters, No. 91.
75 Hume, ‘My Own Life’ (1777), Para. 9.
76 University of Texas [H]arry [R]ansom [C]entre [W]arburton [P]apers, William Warburton to Thomas Balguy 17 January 1752.
77 HRC WP Warburton to Balguy 12 May 1752, 24 March 1752.
78 HRC WP Warburton to Balguy 11 November 1755.
79 For the View’s contents see Young, Religion and Enlightenment, 171–5.
80 HRC WP Warburton to Balguy 6 December 1755.
81 Young, ‘Warburton’.
82 Ernest C. Mossner, ‘Hume’s “Four Dissertations:” An Essay in Biography and Bibliography’, Modern Philology, vol. 48 no. 1 (1950), 37–57 remains thought-provoking despite its reliance on speculation.
83 HRC WP Warburton to Balguy 14 February 1756.
84 See especially Mossner, ‘Hume’s “Four Dissertations”’, 42.
85 Warburton, Unpublished Papers, 315.
86 Hume to Strahan, 22 January 1772, Hume Letters, No. 465.
87 Hume to Smith [February/March 1757], Hume Letters, No. 130.
88 The wording of Warburton’s letter to Hurd in February 1757 hints he only read ‘Natural History of Religion’ at this point, though this conflicts with his February 1756 letter to Balguy.
89 David Hume, Four Dissertations (London: Millar, 1757), ‘Dedication’.
90 Hume to Strahan 1 February 1757, Hume Letters, No. 127.
91 HRC WP Warburton to Balguy 14 February 1756.
92 Warburton to Andrew Millar 7 February 1757, Unpublished Works, 309–10.
93 British Library Add. Mss. 48803A, William Strahan’s Ledger B, fol. 24.
94 [Richard Hurd and William Warburton], Remarks on Mr. Hume’s Natural History of Religion, second edition (London: Cadell, 1777), A2r.
95 E.g. HRC WP Warburton to Balguy 9 March 1757.
96 K. I. D. Maslen and J. Lancaster, The Bowyer Ledgers (London: The Bibliographical Society, 1991), Entries No. 3890, 3942, 3964 and, for the second edition, 4007.
97 Maslen and Lancaster, The Bowyer Ledgers, 4016.
98 Isabel Rivers, ‘Responses to Hume on Religion by Anglicans and Dissenters’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 52 no. 4 (2001): 675–95.
99 Warburton and Hurd, Remarks, 8, 2.
100 Ibid., Remarks, 44, 51.
101 Ibid., Remarks, 4.
102 Andrew Michael, the Chevalier Ramsay, The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion, 2 vols (Glasgow: Foulis, 1748), I:406. Compare, Hume, ‘Natural History of Religion’, Four Dissertations, 1–116 (99–102).
103 Warburton to Millar 7 February 1757, Unpublished Works, 309–10.
104 Ibid., Remarks, 75.
105 Ibid., Remarks, 51.
106 Ibid., Remarks, 74.
107 Hume to Strahan [June 1757], Hume Letters, No. 134.
108 Hume to Millar, 3 September 1757, Hume Letters, No. 140.
109 William Warburton, The Alliance Between Church and State, 4th ed. (London: Millar and Tonson, 1766), 227.
110 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Other Late Political Writings, ed. by Victory Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1762] 1997), Book 2 Chapter 7 Paragraph 12, p. 72. Rousseau’s position was not an accurate representation of Warburton’s argument, which stressed alliance but not identification of interests.
111 Hume to William Strahan 25 June 1771, Hume Letters No. 456.
112 Strahan to Hume 23 July 1771, Eminent Persons, 98.
113 On Hurd see G. M. Ditchfield and Sarah Brewer, ‘Hurd, Richard (1720–1808), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/14249 (Accessed 9 July 2020).
114 Hume, ‘Of Tragedy’; Q. Horatii Flacci Epistolae ad Pisones, et Augustum, 2nd ed., ed. by Richard Hurd (London: Dodsley, Beecroft and Cooper, 1757), 89–90.
115 David Hume, ‘Of Tragedy’, Four Dissertations, 185–200 (185, 191–2).
116 Horatii Flacci Epistolae ad Pisonesed. ed. by Richard Hurd, 89–90.
117 Richard Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues (London: Millar, Thurlborne and Woodyer, 1759), (282)–289. Pagination has been compromised, so Postscript starts on page numbered 302, but runs on to 289.
118 Warburton to Joseph Atwell 8 January 1755, Warburton, Unpublished Papers. See also HRC WP Warburton to Balguy 30 November 1754 and Richard Hurd to William Mason 4 May 1759, Correspondence of Richard Hurd and William Mason, No. 212.
119 Hurd, Dialogues, 302 (i.e. 282), 288.
120 Ibid., 286.
121 Hume to Smith 28 July 1759, Hume Letters, No. 169.
122 Richard Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues, 3rd ed., 3 vols. (London: Millar, Thurlborne and Woodyer. 1765), 328. See also 226.
123 Hurd to Mason, 27 November 1761, Correspondence of Richard Hurd and WIlliam Mason, No. 24.
124 Hurd, Dialogues, 3rd ed., 328.
125 E.g. Thomas Green, Extracts from a Diary of a Lover of Literature (Ipswich: Raw, 1810), entry dated 27 March 1798. See also Francis Kilvert, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Right Rev. Richard Hurd (London: Bentley, 1860), 175.
126 Hurd to Balguy 20 October 1763, Kilvert, Memoirs.
127 HRC WP Warburton to Balguy 26 November 1761; Warburton to Hurd 27 December 1761, Late Eminent Prelate, 334.
128 Hurd to Mason 28 October 1761, Correspondence of RIchard Hurd and William Mason, No. 23.
129 Much of the passage appeared, undated in Hurd’s Commonplace Book, Kilvert, Memoirs, 284.
130 Disraeli, Quarrels, 63–4.
131 [N]ational [L]ibrary of [S]cotland Papers of the Dalrymples of Hailes and Newhailes MS 25297 Hurd to David Dalrymple, 2 November 1776. William Strahan published Hume’s autobiography, along with Adam Smith’s letter to the publisher on Hume, in the Scots Magazine in January 1777.
132 NLS Dalrymple Papers MS 25297 Hurd to Dalrymple 27 December 1776.
133 Richard Hurd, A Discourse, by Way of General Preface to the Quarto Edition of Bishop Warburton’s Works, Containing Some Account of the Life, Writings, and Character of the Author (London: Nichols, 1794), 79–82 (82). The biography was attached to unsold copies of volume 1 of Hurd’s 1788 edition of Warburton’s Works as well as being sold separately.
134 E.g. HRC WP Warburton to Balguy [February, 1751]. Warburton, however, was pleased with the book’s commercial success. See HRC WP Warburton to Balguy 11 August 1751.
135 John Brown, Essays on the Characteristics (London: Davis, 1751), 24–5, 28–9 (eloquence); 163–4 (friendship): and 385–6 (art of prose composition).
136 Ibid., 163–4.
137 [William Rose], Review: An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times, Monthly Review, Vol. 16 (May 1757): 430–43 (430).
138 John Brown, An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Time, 2 vols. (London: Davis and Reymers, 1757–58), I:43–4.
139 HRC WP Warburton to Balguy 25 March 1757.
140 Maslen and Lancaster, The Bowyer Ledgers, Nos. 4101, 4109, 4119, 4121, 4128, and 4131, and 4163.
141 Maslen and Lancaster, The Bowyer Ledgers, No. 4163.
142 Brown, Estimate, I:57–8.
143 Hume to Millar, 20 May 1757, Hume Letters, No. 132.
144 William B. Todd, ‘Foreword’, David Hume History of England 6 vols. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1983), I:xiv–xvii.
145 Hume to Millar, 20 May 1757, Hume Letters, No. 132.
146 Brown, Estimate, II:174, II:84–6. See also II:19–20.
147 Ibid., I:56, II:87.
148 Ibid., II:87.
149 Ibid., 1757, II:86–7.
150 Ibid., II:87–8.
151 Warburton to David Garrick 19 May 1758, The Private Correspondence of David Garrick with the Most Celebrated Persons 2 vols., ed. by James Boaden (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831–32), I:86–7.
152 HRC WP Warburton to Balguy 19 April 1758.
153 Anon., ‘An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times. Vol. II’, The Monthly Review, vol. 18 (April 1758), 355.
154 E.g. Warburton to Hurd 19 September 1757, Eminent Prelate, 188–9.
155 E.g. Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, 4th ed., 2 vols. (London: Davies, Citation1784), I:206.
156 E.g Simon During, Exit Capitalism: Literary Culture, Theory and Post-Secular Modernity (London: Routledge, 2010), esp. 19.
157 Thomas Gray to James Beattie 2 July 1770 in William Mason (ed.), The Poems of Mr. Gray, to which are prefixed memoirs of his life (York: Ward, Dodsley and Todd, 1775), 384–5.
158 Samuel Jackson Pratt, Supplement to the Life of David Hume, Esq. (London: Bew, 1777), 9–11.
159 Reverend John Newton to Martha More May 1797, Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, ed. William Roberts, 3 vols. (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1834), II:14; Joseph Cradock, Literary and Miscellaneous Memoirs, four volumes (London: Nichols, 1828), IV:226.
160 On this framing of the English Enlightenment see Brian W. Young, ‘John Jortin, Ecclesiastical History, and the Christian Republic of Letters’, The Historical Journal, vol. 55 no. 2 (2012): 961–81.
161 Robert M. Ryley, William Warburton (Boston, NJ: Twayne Publishers, 1984), 111.
162 John Towne, The Argument of the Divine Legation Fairly Stated (London: Davis, 1751), 20.
163 John Towne, A Free and Candid Examination of the Principles advanced in the Bishop of London's Sermons (London: Davis and Reymers, 1756), 352.
164 E.g. Morning Post 28 March 1791; Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians, 19, 194–5.
165 Thomas Percy to Hume 5 and 22 January 1773, John Hill Burton, Letters of Eminent Persons, Addressed to David Hume (London: Blackwood and Sons, 1849), 317–42.
166 Owen Ruffhead to Hume 1 March 1763, in Burton, Letters of Eminent Persons, 41–4.
167 Hume to Millar 10 March 1763, Hume Letters, No. 202.
168 Ryley, William Warburton, 41–2.
169 [Y]ale [U]niversity [B]einecke Manuscript Library GEN MSS 34 Thomas Balguy Papers Richard Hurd to Thomas Balguy, 18 August 1779. See also Hurd to Balguy 6 September 1779, 10 December 1779.
170 NLS Dalrymple Papers MS 25299 Balguy to Dalrymple 28 February 1781.
171 Rivers, ‘Responses to Hume on Religion’, 684–6.
172 YUB Thomas Balguy Papers OBS MSS 127 Dalrymple to Balguy 8 May 1785.
173 NLS Dalrymple Papers MS 25297 Hurd to Dalrymple 2 November 1776
174 E.g. comments that Dalrymple’s History (1771) was a ‘very mean performance’ and Dalrymple’s Remarks on the History of Scotland (1773) was full of ‘rubbish’. HRC WP Warburton to Balguy 15 May 1771, HRC WP Warburton to Balguy 13 March 1773.
175 See, for example, the collegiate letters from Hume to Dalrymple 3 May 1753, 10 May 1753 and 3 April 1754, Hume Letters Nos. 82, 83, and 92.
176 Hume to Strahan 15 July 1766, Hume Letters, No. 338. See also Hume’s jibing comments about Dalrymple’s intellectual and prose failings in Hume to Gilbert Elliot 5 July 1768 and [n.d. July] 1768, Hume Letters, Nos. 418, 420.
177 YUB OSB Mss 127 Dalrymple to Balguy 17 September 1778.
178 YUB OSB Mss 127 Dalrymple to Balguy 10 March 1781.
179 David Dalrymple, Annals of Scotland, 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Creech, Cadell and Davies 1797), II:48, II;153–4; II:261. For praise see III:144.
180 [David Dalrymple], Davidis Humei, Scoti, summi apud suos philosophi: De vita sua acta, liber singularis ([Edinburgh]: n.p., 1787); [ibid.], Adami Smithi, LL.D. ad Gulielmum Strahanum, armigerum, de rebus novissimis Davidis Humei epistola ([Edinburgh]: n.p., 1788); Hume to Strahan 15 July 1766, Hume Letters, No. 338.
181 [David Dalrymple], Davidis Humei, 8. I am grateful to Dr Felix Waldmann for his translation of this footnote. Hurd explained the Remarks’ composition to Dalrymple in 1777. See NLS Dalrymple Papers MS 25297 Hurd to Dalrymple 15 March 1777.
182 Dalrymple, Address of Tertullian, 108–9.
183 Hume is not a major figure in either Isaac Disraeli’s lengthy essay ‘Warburton and His Quarrel’s’ in Israeli, Quarrels, 1–76, or in Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians, bar 214–6.