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ABSTRACT
Nearly four decades after David Raynor attributed to David Hume an allegorical Scots militia pamphlet from the early 1760s popularly known as Sister Peg, there is still no scholarly consensus about whether the author was in fact Hume or his friend Adam Ferguson. Using new evidence that has emerged since the appearance of Raynor’s edition in 1982 – including information about Sister Peg’s publication history, Ferguson’s handwritten corrections and revisions in the Abbotsford copy of the work, a 1767 newspaper article by James Boswell and a copy of a 1775 letter by Sir John Dalrymple that both named Ferguson as the author, two volumes of Ferguson’s correspondence published in 1995, and a recently discovered letter by Ferguson from 1809 – this article seeks to resolve this controversy by establishing that Sister Peg was written by Ferguson, as his fellow militia agitator Alexander Carlyle asserted in his memoirs. In the process, the article refutes Raynor’s arguments about Ferguson’s supposed incapacity for writing a satirical pamphlet like Sister Peg and clarifies the nature of Hume’s views and actions in regard to the Scots militia cause during the Seven Years’ War. The article also throws light on several related issues affecting Hume and Ferguson’s circle.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to David Raynor for sharing information and ideas during the course of our ongoing debate about Sister Peg; to Eugene Heath, John Robertson, Mikko Tolonen, and Felix Waldmann for their perceptive readings of earlier drafts of this article; and to Robert Betteridge, David Brown, Jim Fieser, Eugene Heath, Rachel Hewitt, Zubin Meer, Florence Petroff, Spartaco Pupo, Susan Rennie, Jeff Smitten, and Bill Zachs for help with particular topics. Thanks to Ralph McLean of the National Library of Scotland for (among many other services) steering me to a two-volume photocopied letter book of Alexander Fraser Tytler; to Doris Sher for discovering Ferguson’s letter of 17 October 1809 in that letter book while she was helping me search for materials on a different subject in July 2015; to members of the panel and the audience who responded to my discussion of Ferguson’s 1809 letter at the joint meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Studies Society in Pittsburgh in April 2016; and to the owner of that letter for permission to reproduce it. Andrea Longson and Sara Berry of the Advocates Library helped me gain access to the Abbotsford copy of Sister Peg, which is part of the collection of the Faculty of Advocates Abbotsford Collection Trust. The letter from Sir John Dalrymple to Lord Bute in the appendix is reproduced by permission of the trustees of the National Library of Scotland.
This article is dedicated to M. A. (‘Sandy’) Stewart (1938–2021), who invited me to review David Raynor’s edition of Sister Peg in Philosophical Books in 1982 and set a lofty standard for precision and perseverance in historical editing and research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Duncan Forbes, ‘The Militia Question’, TLS, 23 July 1982, 806. Others convinced by Raynor’s attribution include Robert McRae in University of Toronto Quarterly 52 (1983): 419–20; H. T. Dickinson in Parliamentary History 3 (1984): 228–9; K. E. Smith in British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 6 (1983): 282–3; and the anonymous author of ‘Sister Peg: Adam Ferguson or David Hume?’ in David Hume and the Eighteenth Century British Thought: An Annotated Catalogue. Supplement, ed. Sadao Ikeda, Michihiro Otonashi, and Tamihiro Shigemori (Tokyo: Chuo University Library, 1988), 17–20.
2 See the critical reviews of Raynor’s edition by Roger L. Emerson in Hume Studies 9 (1983): 74–81, by John Robertson in English Historical Review 100 (1985): 191–2, and by Richard B. Sher in Philosophical Books 24 (1983): 85–91.
3 In this article, the first edition of Sister Peg (ESTC T122564) is cited as SP1; the nearly identical ‘second edition’ printed in London (ESTC T122565) is cited a SPL2; and the ‘second edition’ printed in Edinburgh with a London imprint (ESTC T214143) is referred to as SPE2. David Raynor’s 1982 edition is cited as SPR.
4 As discussed below, Donald W. Livingston remarked in a 1998 book on Hume that a passage in Henry Mackenzie’s biography of John Home provides support for Raynor’s position. More recently, Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind, A Philosopher’s Economist: Hume and the Rise of Capitalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), states that ‘David Raynor argues convincingly’ that Hume was the author of Sister Peg (246 n. 19). Spartaco Pupo attributes Sister Peg to Hume in his collection of Hume’s writings titled A Petty Statesman: Writings on War and International Affairs (Milan: Mimesis, 2019), 49 n. 111, in his book David Hume: The Sceptical Conservative (Mimesis, 2020), 75, and in his Italian translation of Sister Peg in David Hume, Scritti satirici (1750–1760), ed. Spartaco Pupo (Milan: Jouvence, 2020), which supersedes an earlier Italian translation that appeared under Hume’s name with the title Il caso di Margaret, detta Peg, unica sorella legittima di John Bull (Palermo: Sellerio, 1992).
5 Sister Peg does not appear in James Fieser’s comprehensive Bibliography of Hume’s Writings and Early Responses, first published in 2003, revised in 2005, and made available on the Internet in 2021 (https://www.academia.edu/47510536/A_Bibliography_of_Humes_Writings_and_Early_Responses, accessed 31 August 2021).
6 For example, in the introduction to the standard edition of Tobias Smollett’s The History and Adventures of an Atom (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), Robert Adams Day comments that Sister Peg was ‘generally attributed to Adam Ferguson (though possibly by David Hume)’, adding in a footnote, ‘The attribution remains unsettled at present’ (xlv and lxxii n. 90). Alexander Murdoch, whose ‘The People Above’: Politics and Administration in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1980) took its title phrase from Sister Peg and attributed the work to Ferguson, describes it in Making the Union Work: Scotland, 1651–1763 (London: Routledge, 2020) as ‘a pamphlet … attributed variously to Adam Ferguson or David Hume’ (2).
7 Alasdair Raffe, ‘John Bull, Sister Peg, and Anglo–Scottish Relations in the Eighteenth Century’, in Literature and Union: Scottish Texts, British Contexts, ed. Gerard Carruthers and Colin Kidd (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 41–59, states that Sister Peg was ‘probably by … Adam Ferguson’ (53), with no mention of Hume. Gilles Robel, in helpfully reprinting a rare anonymous sequel to Sister Peg, Sister Peg’s Memorial to One of Her Clerks, on the Subject of Some Late and Present Grievances (Edinburgh, 1763) – which he speculates (with no substantial evidence) that Hume may have written – acknowledges that Sister Peg itself seems to have been the work of Ferguson (‘David Hume, John Bull et Sister Peg’, in Écosse des Lumières le XVIIIe siècle autrement, ed. Pierre Morère [Grenoble, France: ELLUG, Université Stendhal, 1997]: 151–85, citing 172, accessed via Open Edition Books, https://books.openedition.org/ugaeditions/7407?lang=fr, 21 June 2021). David Thomas Konig, ‘The Second Amendment: A Missing Transatlantic Context for the Historical Meaning of “the Right of the People to Keep and Bear Arms”’, Law and History Review 22 (2004): 119–59, cites Raynor’s edition but notes that ‘Hume’s authorship of “Sister Peg” is open to serious doubt, and Adam Ferguson is the more likely author’ (131 n. 38; see also 134 n. 46). But in another article containing an allusion to Sister Peg in the American context, ‘John Bull and the American Revolution: The Transatlantic Afterlives of Arbuthnot’s Character’, Journal of British Studies 56 (2017): 51–69, Leah Orr writes, ‘Although generally ascribed to Adam Ferguson, David R. Raynor argues convincingly for David Hume’s authorship’ (57 n. 27). Most peculiarly, Jennifer Clark, The American Idea of England, 1776–1840: Transatlantic Writing (New York: Routledge, 2013), asserts that Sister Peg ‘was written by David Hume under the pseudonym of Adam Ferguson’ (60).
8 The History of John Bull, with Large Explanatory Notes; as also of the Proceedings in the Case of Margaret, Commonly Called Peg, Only Lawful Sister of John Bull, Esq; with a Complete Key (Edinburgh: Printed by David Willison, 1769), with the uniform title Law Is a Bottomless Pit. This edition was presumably pirated; according to the Scottish Book Trade Index (https://data.cerl.org/sbti, accessed 21 June 2021), in 1775 Willison would be sued by the London printer William Strahan (1715–85) and his publishing partners for printing an unauthorised edition of the works of Laurence Sterne. Willison’s 1769 edition of The History of John Bull/Law Is a Bottomless Pit, containing Sister Peg, probably sold poorly, as it was reissued in 1776 with a cancel title page and a false imprint that reads ‘London: Printed for M. Cowper, Pater-noster Row’. The ‘Alphabetical Key’ to the names and terms in Willison’s edition of Sister Peg is larger than, and sometimes different from, the key prefixed to Raynor’s edition. A smaller handwritten key is opposite the Contents page in the Queen’s University (Ontario) copy of SPE2 (Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/historyofproceed00ferguoft/page/n3/mode/2up, accessed 21 June 2021).
9 This is how ‘the game-keeper’, or ‘Gamekeepers’, is defined in the ‘Alphabetical Key’ in Willison’s 1769 reprint of Sister Peg, cited in the previous note.
10 J. West to Newcastle: Report on Speeches in the Scotch Militia Debate on 15 April 1760, British Library, Newcastle Papers, Add. MSS. 32904, fols. 392–4 (courtesy of John Robertson). Speakers against the bill who were connected with Newcastle include, in order of their speeches, Sir William Williams (c. 1730–61), Rose Fuller (1708–77), Thomas Townshend junior (1733–1800), Robert Boyle-Walsingham (1736–80), Robert Nugent (1709–88), Harry Powlett (1720–94), Barrington, and Hardwicke’s son Charles Yorke (1722–70), the Solicitor General. The only English MP to speak for the bill was the London alderman William Beckford (1709–70). See also J. R. Western, The English Militia in the Eighteenth Century: The Story of a Political Issue, 1660–1800 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 166–7; John Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1985), 112–13; and Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (1985; Edinburgh Classic Edition, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 227–9.
11 See, for example, the section of the ironical pamphlet on Pitt by O. M. Haberdasher [i.e., Alexander Carlyle], Plain Reasons for Removing a Certain Great Man from His M------y’s Presence and Councils For Ever (London, 1759), titled ‘Another reason for dismissing Mr. P--t, is because he was a chief promoter of the militia’ (10–14), referring to the English Militia Act of 1757. On the English militia, see Western, English Militia, chap. 6, and Eliga H. Gould, ‘To Strengthen the King’s Hand: Dynastic Legitimacy, Militia Reform and Ideas of National Unity in England, 1745–1760’, The Historical Journal 34 (1991): 329–48.
12 Gould, ‘To Strengthen the King’s Hand’, 342.
13 The May 1760 issues of the Scots Magazine (22:268–9) and the Edinburgh Magazine (4:274–5) published a letter to Gilbert Elliot from the provost of Stirling, dated 9 May, granting him ‘the freedom of the borough’, followed by Elliot’s reply of 21 May.
14 Raynor suggests plausibly that in this instance ‘the game-keeper’ represents Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721–65), ‘who had forced Townshend to resign his commission in 1750’ (SPR, 115 n. 62).
15 [Alexander Carlyle], The Question Relating to a Scots Militia Considered. In a Letter to the Lords and Gentlemen Who Have Concerted the Form of a Law for that Establishment. By a Freeholder (Edinburgh, 1760). Carlyle’s pamphlet was initially published in January 1760; the London edition with a preface by ‘An Independent Briton’ (Townshend) appeared when the Scots militia bill was in play in March. Carlyle commented in his memoirs that his pamphlet came to be called ‘the Militia Pamphlet’, which perhaps accounts for the fact that Hume – who thought it was ‘certainly wrote with Spirit’ – referred to it as ‘Our [apparently meaning Scotland’s] Militia Pamphlet’ in a letter to his publisher in London, Andrew Millar (1705–68), on 22 March 1760. See Sher, Church and University, 225–8; The Autobiography of Dr. Alexander Carlyle of Inveresk, 1722–1805, ed. John Hill Burton, new ed. (London and Edinburgh: T. N. Foulis, 1910; repr., with an introduction by Richard B. Sher, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1990), 418; The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), 1:322 (hereafter cited as Hume Letters).
16 Edinburgh Magazine 5 (January 1761): 52.
17 As discussed by Edith Haden Guest in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1754–1790 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), ed. Lewis Namier and John Brooke, 3 vols., https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1754-1790/member/hope-weir-hon-charles-1710-91 (accessed 21 June 2021). Hope Weir’s vote against the Scots militia bill provoked such a violent reaction in Scotland that he barely managed to retain his seat (Linlithgowshire) at the general election in spring 1761. The Scottish MP Alexander Hume Campbell (1708–60) avoided Weir’s fate by staying away from Parliament on 15 April, and he died the following summer (http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1754-1790/member/hume-campbell-hon-alexander-1708-60, accessed 21 June 2021).
18 Raynor identifies ‘Suck-Fist’ as Samuel Johnson (SPR, 122 n. 94), but the ‘Alphabetical Key’ in Willison’s 1769 reprint of Sister Peg correctly identifies him as ‘Col. W[a]ts[o]n’. In the handwritten key cited in note 8 above he is ‘Genl Watson’, and he is also ‘General Watson’ in a key printed in John Small, Biographical Sketch of Adam Ferguson, LL.D., F.R.S.E. (Edinburgh: Neill, 1864), 9 n.
19 See Rachel Hewitt, Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordinance Survey (London: Granta, 2010) and ‘A Family Affair: The Dundas Family of Arniston and the Military Survey of Scotland (1747–1755)’, Imago Mundi 64 (2012): 60–77, which also corrects Watson’s date of birth, given as ‘1713?’ in the ODNB.
20 The Principal Heads of a Speech in P--------t, concerning the Scots Militia. By a Right Honourable M-----r from a Certain County in N-----h B-----n. Being an Extract of Part of a Letter from a Gentleman of Rank at London to His Friend in Edinburgh ([Edinburgh], 1760), 3–4. This pamphlet consists of a title page, Advertisement, and two pages of an ‘extract’ from Dundas’s speech. Although the place of publication is not given, the wording of the Advertisement cited at note 135 below establishes that it was Edinburgh. The Advertisement comments that ‘the Gentleman [i.e., Watson] who wrote this letter [i.e., extract from Dundas’s speech] had frequent opportunities of knowing his L-------p’s sentiments concerning the militia, long before this speech was delivered: he likewise heard his L-------p deliver the speech in the H--se’. It appears, then, that Watson, who resided in London at this time in his life, attended Parliament on the day of the Scots militia debate, took detailed notes, and sent them to an unidentified ‘Friend’ in Edinburgh, who first circulated the extract in manuscript (as the Advertisement states) and then published it with an Advertisement.
21 Carlyle, Autobiography, 272.
22 Ibid., 426. We can only guess about the identity of Carlyle’s ‘friend’. My guess is George Townshend’s younger brother Charles (1725–67), later of Townshend Acts fame, Carlyle’s ‘old friend’ from their school days together in Leiden. Their ‘intimacy’ (as Carlyle calls it more than once) was renewed when Townshend made an extended visit to Scotland in the summer of 1759, and it was afterwards continued through correspondence (Carlyle, Autobiography, 175, 369, 405, 418, 515). Townshend would have been familiar with Carlyle’s ‘ironical style’ (Carlyle, Autobiography, 401–2), used in a 1757 pamphlet defending John Home’s tragedy Douglas, An Argument to Prove that the Tragedy of Douglas Ought to be Publickly Burnt by the Hands of the Hangman (Carlyle, Autobiography, 328), as well as in Carlyle’s 1759 pamphlet praising William Pitt (cited in note 11 above) – works that according to Carlyle led people to think that he had written Sister Peg as well (Carlyle, Autobiography, 427). Townshend was also an enthusiastic proponent of the Scots militia cause: he stirred up interest in it during his visit to Scotland and, along with his brother, spoke for the bill in Parliament when it was proposed on 2 March 1760 (see Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, 106–10). But it does not seem that Townshend knew Ferguson well or corresponded with him.
23 Carlyle, Autobiography, 426–7. Carlyle also attributed the work to Ferguson when he wrote that ‘Mrs. Montague [Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800)] was highly delighted with “Sister Peg”, which Ferguson had written’ (485).
24 Ibid., 297.
25 A letter of 16 October 1760 from Carlyle to Henry Scott (1746–1812), then Earl of Dalkeith, later third Duke of Buccleuch, confirms that Ferguson had taken up residence in a house in Inveresk ‘last summer’ (Townshend Papers, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan).
26 Carlyle, Autobiography, 427.
27 Hume to Carlyle, 3 February 1761, Hume Letters, 1:341–2.
28 Henry Mackenzie, An Account of the Life and Writings of John Home, Esq. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1822), 25–6, 154–6; also published in the first volume of The Works of John Home, Esq., 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1822).
29 SPR, 9.
30 Ibid., quoted 1–2 and n. 4, as corrected from a photocopy of this letter in Edinburgh University Library, La.II.601 (courtesy of David Raynor).
31 Quoted in Sher, Church and University, 227.
32 Carlyle, Autobiography, 420. Emphasis added.
33 Forbes, ‘Militia Question’.
34 SPR, 114 n. 57.
35 Ibid., 121 n. 89.
36 In the three letters to Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), that Raynor cites as evidence of Hume’s consideration of a military career in 1746 (two of which are actually from 1747), Hume writes that he is not very fond of his best military career option (24 July 1746), that discussing military prospects can serve no purpose because ‘I am a Philosopher, & so, I suppose, must continue’ (second half of January 1747), and that it is ‘too late’ for him to have a career in the army (end of June 1747). New Letters of David Hume, ed. Raymond Klibansky and Ernest C. Mossner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), 20, 23, 26 (hereafter cited as New Hume Letters).
37 Carlyle, Autobiography, 296. The sobriquet ‘warlike chaplain’ was applied to Ferguson by Sir Walter Scott in regard to Ferguson’s military ardour at the Battle of Fontenoy in May 1745 (review of Mackenzie, Works of John Home, Quarterly Review 36 [June 1827]: 167–216, citing 196). Although Scott’s account has sometimes been dismissed as a fabrication because Ferguson was still in Scotland when the Battle of Fontenoy was fought, it seems more likely, considering Scott’s close relationship with Ferguson and his family (as noted below), that Ferguson’s heroics occurred at a different battle in which his regiment was involved, such as the battle of Bergen op Zoom in September 1747. Ferguson used the term ‘Warlike Philosopher’ to describe himself in a letter to Sir John Macpherson (c. 1745–1821) of 14 May 1798. See The Correspondence of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merolle, with an introduction by Jane B. Fagg, 2 vols. (London: William Pickering, 1995), 1:xxiv, 2:433 (hereafter cited as Merolle).
38 SPR, 121 n. 90.
39 Ibid., n. 91.
40 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society, ed. Fania Oz-Salzberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 75.
41 SPR, 110 n. 36.
42 On the continuity of such themes in Ferguson’s moral philosophy lecture notes and unpublished writings from late in life, see Richard B. Sher, ‘Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, and the Problem of National Defense’, Journal of Modern History 61 (1989): 240–68.
43 Carlyle, Autobiography, 419.
44 Ibid., 418–19.
45 Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, 105. The phrase ‘to mix the military spirit with our civil and commercial policy’ appears in Ferguson’s Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (London, 1756), 3, and Carlyle, Question Relating to a Scots Militia Considered, 16. Carlyle’s debt to Ferguson’s pamphlet is also evident from this sentence in Carlyle’s Autobiography: ‘Ferguson had published a very superior militia pamphlet in London a year or two before, in which all the genuine principles of that kind of national defence were clearly unfolded’ (420).
46 David Raynor, ‘Ferguson, Adam (1723–1816)’, The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century British Philosophers, ed. John W. Yolton, John Valdimir Price, and John Stephens (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1999), 325; reproduced in the online Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Philosophers (2019), https://www.bloomsburyphilosophylibrary.com/article?docid=b-9781350052482&tocid=b-9781350052482-0198 (accessed 21 June 2021) and in a slightly abridged version in The Biographical Dictionary of British Economists, ed. Donald Rutherford, 2 vols. (Bristol: Thoemmes Continuum, 2004), 1:379.
47 Although Raynor’s edition never mentions the possibility that Hume and Ferguson may have been co-authors of Sister Peg, the introduction contains a hypothetical ‘collaborator’ account that begins, ‘Let us suppose that in August [1760] Ferguson accepts the commission to write the satire, and brings Hume in as a collaborator. But Ferguson is busy preparing his lectures in natural philosophy (a subject he knows little about) so that the project falls to Hume alone’ (SPR, 7). In this imaginary scenario, Ferguson is sworn to secrecy by Hume and conceals the truth from Carlyle and others who knew he had accepted a commission to write the pamphlet; Jardine tricks Hume by telling him that the secret of Hume’s authorship has already been discovered by Carlyle; Hume (who was no fool) falls for Jardine’s trick completely and, ‘offended by the breach of trust’ by the printer who supposedly had revealed his identity, writes his letter to Carlyle. Not only is this imaginary ‘collaborator’ scenario, as well as any co-author scenario, unsupported by existing evidence, but all such hypotheses would also require us to believe that Ferguson deliberately and uncharacteristically deceived Carlyle and the others who knew the secret of his authorship, that Ferguson continued this deception when Carlyle – one of his closest friends – showed him Hume’s letter or discussed its contents (as he certainly would have done), and for the rest of Carlyle’s life.
48 Warren McDougall, ‘Gavin Hamilton, John Balfour and Patrick Neill: A Study of Publishing in Edinburgh in the Eighteenth Century’ (PhD diss., University of Edinburgh, 1974), 422.
49 The only significant difference between the texts of these two editions, involving the spelling of the term used to represent Highlanders, is discussed below.
50 Books Printed for and Sold by W. Owen, at Homer’s Head, near Temple-Bar, in Fleet-street [London, 1755?] lists seventy-three titles, most of which were sold bound for two or three shillings. In 1750 Strahan had collaborated with William Owen on Lyonell Vane’s translation of Jean Du Bec’s History of the Life of Tamerlane the Great, with an imprint that read ‘London: Printed by W. Strahan; and sold by W. Owen … ’
51 The payment of £6.1s.5½d. from Neill appears to have been a reimbursement for an advance payment Strahan had made to Neill on 31 December 1760, marked in the ledger as ‘To Balances on Hist. of M.’ (Add. MS. 48803A, fol. 100, courtesy of David Raynor).
52 By far the largest of these joint publications in which both Strahan and Owen were involved as co-publishers was the fourth edition of Paul de Rapin de Thoyras’s History of England in twelve octavo volumes (1757), followed by the third edition of Nicholas Tindal’s Continuation of Mr. Rapin de Thoyras’s History of England in two octavo volumes (1757), and variations and expansions of those works through the late 1750s and early 1760s. Strahan and Owen were also both part of the large group that co-published A Dictionary of the Holy Bible in three octavo volumes in 1759.
53 Strahan to Hume, 27 Feb. 1772, Letters of David Hume to William Strahan, ed. G. Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1888), 244. On Strahan and the London Chronicle, see J. A. Cochrane, Dr. Johnson’s Printer: The Life of William Strahan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 103–4, 131.
54 Strahan certainly knew of Ferguson at the time of this letter to Hume in 1772, because he had already printed two editions of Ferguson’s Essay on the History of Civil Society: five hundred copies of the quarto second edition in December 1767 (Add MS 48800, fol. 156) and one thousand copies of the first octavo edition in March 1768 (Add MS 48801, fol. 27); see Richard B. Sher, The Enlightenment and the Book: Scottish Authors and Their Publishers in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ireland, and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 318–26. Strahan and Ferguson would meet, apparently for the first time, at Hume’s home in the Edinburgh New Town on 5 September 1773, when Strahan wrote in his travel diary, ‘Supped at Mr. David Hume’s in the new Town, in Company with Professor Ferguson, and past the Evening in most agreeable Conversation’ (William Strahan Journals, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, B/St 83).
55 Except insofar as he provided books to Americans such as his old friend David Hall (1714–72) in Philadelphia, Strahan was not a ‘Bookseller’, and Hume would not normally have referred to him by that term, especially in regard to a work that Strahan had printed.
56 Hume to Strahan, [November or December 1760], Hume Letters, 1:335. Emphasis added.
57 Hume to Strahan, [February 1759], ibid., 1:295. The opening words in Hume’s letter cited in the previous note – ‘You gave me a sensible Satisfaction by writing to me’ (Hume Letters, 1:335) – also suggest that the recent letter from Strahan to which Hume alludes, which has not been traced, broke a long epistolary silence between them.
58 Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 401–2.
59 Hume Letters, 1:316–17, 321, 332. These letters from Hume to Millar are also printed, with fuller annotation in regard to the History of England, in Adam Budd, Circulating Enlightenment: The Career and Correspondence of Andrew Millar, 1725–68 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 216–17, 223–4, 240.
60 Hume was working at breakneck speed to fulfil his contract partly in order to oblige Millar’s ‘Purpose’ regarding rapid publication of the two volumes of The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Accession of Henry VII (which actually occurred in November 1761, ahead of Hume’s estimate), as well as a six-volume set of the complete History of England that followed in 1762. But financial incentive may also have played a part, as Hume was apparently not to be paid by Millar until two months after publication of the two-volume work. See Budd, Circulating Enlightenment, 217 n. 5, 240 nn. 4–5.
61 Hume to Strahan, 9 February 1761, Hume Letters, 1:342–3.
62 London Chronicle, 23–25 December 1760; Public Advertiser, 25 December 1760, quoting the London Chronicle. Ann V. Gunn, ‘The Fire of Faction: Sources for Paul Sandby’s Satires of 1762–63’, Print Quarterly 34 (2017): 400–18, lists an advertisement in the London Evening Post, 23–25 December 1760, and ESTC cites another from the Whitehall Evening Post, 27–30 December 1760.
63 The advertisement on 3 January 1761 is cited in Warren Mcdougall, ‘A Catalogue of Hamilton, Balfour and Neill Publications, 1750–1762’, in Spreading the Word: The Distribution of Networks of Print, 1550–1850, ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris (Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1998), 227, item 305.
64 William Gray (fl. 1748–1800) and possibly David Home (fl. 1764), in Scottish Book Trade Index (SBTI), https://data.cerl.org/sbti/_search (accessed 21 June 2021).
65 Public Advertiser, 28, 29, and 30 January 1761.
66 Caledonian Mercury, 11 February 1761 (cited in McDougall, ‘Catalogue of Hamilton, Balfour and Neill Publications’, 227, item 306, although SPE2 is confused there with SPL2); Edinburgh Evening Courant, 18 February 1761. The advertisements for the second edition printed in Edinburgh added as one of the sellers ‘F. Douglas, Aberdeen’, the bookseller Francis Douglas (1719–86) (SBTI and ODNB).
67 Sir Walter Scott, The Antiquary, ed. David Hewitt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1995), 46. Oldbuck continues:
Doest thou remember the Nurse’s dream in that exquisite work, which she recounts in such agony to Hubble Bubble? [referring to Sister Peg, chap. 6, though the nurse’s dream is not told to Hubble-bubble there] – When she would have taken up a piece of broadcloth in her vision, lo! it exploded like a great iron cannon. When she put out her hand to save a pirn [spool of thread], it perked up in her face in the form of a pistol. My own vision in Edinburgh has been something similar –
68 Scott wrote about Sister Peg, Hume’s letter to Carlyle of 3 February 1761 (which he termed ‘a curious jest’ by Hume), the Poker Club, and the Young Poker in his review of Henry Mackenzie’s life of John Home in the June 1827 issue of the Quarterly Review (36:198–9). Mackenzie had consulted Scott before going to press, and in his reply of 3 March 1820, Scott gave this advice: ‘The letter of David [Hume] owning Sister Pegg might also be introduced with great advantage. These little traits of particular & individual character (without descending to the gossip of Boswell) seem to me in biography what the bas reliefs on the pedestal of a statue are to the figure itself – they both enliven the critical dissertation and give it a personal individuality.’ The Letters of Sir Walter Scott, ed. H. J. C. Grierson, 12 vols. (London: Constable, 1932–37), 6:144.
69 Fagg, Introduction, in Merolle, 1:lxxv, and Merolle, 2:330.
70 In the fall of 1797 Scott and Ferguson’s son Adam visited Ferguson at Hallyards, the farm near Peebles where he lived from 1796 to 1809. In 1806 Scott and the African explorer Mungo Park (1771–1809) dined at Hallyards with ‘Scott’s revered friend, Dr Adam Ferguson’, as Scott’s son-in-law and biographer John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854) put it (Fagg, Introduction, in Merolle, 1:xcv; J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., new ed. [Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1852], 117).
71 The copy belongs, with the rest of Scott’s library collection, to the Faculty of Advocates Abbotsford Collection Trust, and is kept in Scott’s library in Abbotsford House. The Advocates Library was responsible for cataloguing the collection and has posted the title page and Scott’s inscription at http://lib1.advocates.org.uk/Annotations/55528.pdf (accessed 21 June 2021).
72 Mark Towsey, Reading the Scottish Enlightenment: Books and Their Readers in Provincial Scotland, 1750–1820 (Leiden: Brill, 2010) and Reading History in Britain and America, c. 1750–c. 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); David Allan, Making British Culture: English Readers and the Scottish Enlightenment, 1740–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2008).
73 The fact that the Abbotsford copy is a first edition of Sister Peg does not settle this issue. Since, as noted above, there were no substantive changes in the second edition besides the spelling of the term used to represent Highlanders, Ferguson could have used a copy of the first edition for making changes intended for either the second or third editions.
74 The Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. … with Notes, and A Life of the Author, by Walter Scott, Esq., 19 vols. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1814), 6:236.
75 Ibid., 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1824), 6:4.
76 Fagg, Introduction, in Merolle, 1:xxxv, xlix.
77 SPR, 5–6.
78 John Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Scotland and Scotsmen in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Alexander Allardyce, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1888; repr., with an introduction by David Brown, Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996), 1:334 n. 1.
79 Ibid., 1:321, 333–4; Carlyle, Autobiography, 279.
80 Ramsay, Scotland and Scotsmen, 2:355.
81 SPR, 6.
82 Ibid., 2–3; John Valdimir Price, The Ironic Hume (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1965), 61 and 173–5, where the Bellmen’s Petition is reprinted.
83 Elsewhere, however, Raynor calls a passage from Ferguson’s Reflections ‘eloquent’. See David Raynor, ‘Ferguson’s Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia’, in Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature, ed. Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008), 65–72, 197, quoting 69.
84 Hume to Blair, 11 February 1766, Hume Letters, 2:12. See also David R. Raynor, ‘Why Did David Hume Dislike Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society?’ in Adam Ferguson: Philosophy, Politics and Society, ed. Eugene Heath and Vincenzo Merolle (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 45–72, 179–88. Lord Kames told Elizabeth Montagu that Ferguson’s Essay ‘employs some vigour in writing, and much original thought’, and the poet Thomas Gray found ‘uncommon strains of eloquence in it’ despite ‘a manner of writing too short-winded and sententious’ (Merolle, 2:546). James Boswell called it ‘a pretty Book’ in a letter to William Johnson Temple of 1 February 1767, and Temple responded enthusiastically on 8 February 1768: ‘I have been reading Mr Ferguson’s book. What a monument of penetration, of patriotism, of genious & of eloquence!’ (The Correspondence of James Boswell and William Johnson Temple, 1756–1795, vol. 1, 1756–1777, ed. Thomas Crawford [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997], 168, 221). The Critical Review and Monthly Review were in agreement in their high praise, and both were favourably impressed by the book’s style, which William Rose’s long notice in the Monthly called ‘clear and nervous, and in many places sprightly and animated’ (36 [March 1767]: 221). The anonymous review in the Critical for February 1767, which was reprinted in the March issue of the Scots Magazine, remarked that no one could read it ‘without rising a better man and citizen, or without finding himself improved in sense, sentiment, and stile’ (quoted in Allan, Making British Culture, 34). Hume would write to Ferguson on 10 March 1767 that ‘it is with a sincere Pleasure I inform you of the general Success of your Book’ (Hume Letters, 2:125), in effect acknowledging that the last sentence on this subject in his panic-stricken prepublication letter to Blair – ‘I shall be agreeably disappointed, if the Success prove contrary to my Opinion’ (Hume Letters, 2:12) – had resulted in his agreeable disappointment. On 1 April Hume told Blair that the book’s success ‘gives me great Satisfaction’ (2:133), but there is no evidence that he altered his own view of its merits. See also ‘Appendix B: On the Reception of Ferguson’s Works’, in The Manuscripts of Adam Ferguson, ed. Vincenzo Merolle (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2006), 299–319.
85 [Ferguson], Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia, 24.
86 Merolle, 2:353.
87 Ibid., 2:430–1
88 John D. Brewer, ‘Ferguson’s Epistolary Self’, in Heath and Merolle, Adam Ferguson: History, Progress and Human Nature, 7–22, esp. 18 and 22, and ‘Putting Adam Ferguson in His Place’, British Journal of Sociology 58 (2007): 105–22. For a critique of Brewer’s arguments by a scholar who views Ferguson’s ‘Highland ethos’ as central to his philosophy, see Jack A. Hill, Adam Ferguson and Ethical Integrity: The Man and His Prescriptions for the Moral Life (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 3–10.
89 On Ferguson’s father, also named Adam, though he spelled his surname with two s’s, see Jane B. Fagg, ‘“Complaints and Clamours”: The Ministry of Adam Fergusson, 1700–1754’, Records of the Scottish Church History Society (1994): 288–308. Ferguson’s mother, Mary Gordon, was a daughter of the landed gentry in Aberdeenshire, who could trace descent to the family of the dukes of Argyll.
90 Fagg, Introduction, in Merolle, 1:xx–xxiv. Although Ferguson spoke Gaelic well enough to obtain the deputy chaplaincy before completing the normal term as a divinity student and to preach a fast-day jeremiad to his regiment while stationed on the outskirts of London in December 1745 (discussed in Sher, Church and University, 40–2), we do not know how effectively he delivered it or how closely it corresponded to the published English version, A Sermon Preached in the Ersh Language to His Majesty’s First Highland Regiment of Foot, Commanded by Lord John Murray, at their Cantonment at Camberwell, on the 18th Day of December, 1745 (reproduced in Matthew Arbo, ‘Adam Ferguson’s Sermon in the Ersh Language: A Word from 2 Samuel on Martial Responsibility and Political Order’, Political Theology 12 [2011]: 894–908). Ferguson’s stipend as deputy chaplain came from the senior chaplain, the Episcopal clergyman Gideon Murray (1710–76), a younger brother of Patrick, Lord Elibank.
91 Denise Ann Testa, ‘“A Bastard Gaelic Man”: Reconsidering the Highland Roots of Adam Ferguson’ (PhD diss., University of Western Sydney, 2007), 85.
92 Ibid., 77, 117, 122, 195.
93 Ibid., 188–9 and n. 220.
94 Ibid., 193.
95 Ibid., 188 n. 222.
96 As if this isn’t confusing enough, Willison’s 1769 reprint introduces a new variation, ‘Mr. Maclurchar’, in most instances, but once ‘Mr. Macluchar’ (23)! And the key in Willison’s edition identifies this character, curiously, as ‘The young Chevalier [i.e., Bonnie Prince Charlie], and sometimes the Highland militia.’
97 The earliest extant letter from Ferguson to Carlyle, dated 29 April 1775 (Merolle, 1:123–5), is an epistolary gem that demonstrates Ferguson’s skill and wit as a correspondent and ability to sustain and develop a humorous motif. It begins: ‘In answer to the two or three letters which you have written to me I can give you five or six which I had written in my own mind to you before I received any of yours.’ It then runs through Ferguson’s five letters ‘in my own mind’: from Geneva, ‘where having had the advantage of Lodging in Calvins own house & having access to some of his most Secret Manuscripts I thought myself without Vanity qualified to give you some light into the more Intricate recess’s of our Church’; from Ferney, where Ferguson had encounters with Voltaire which are described with wit and humour; from the Alps; from Switzerland, where he ‘coud have shed tears’ upon viewing ‘the Militia exercise’, ‘the only body of men I ever Saw under Arms on the true principle for which Arms shoud be carried’; and from ‘the Devils own backside in the neighbourhood of This place’ (Blackheath in England). It continues: ‘As I have already written you five letters & this new sheet may pass for another you will please to Observe that you are at least four letters in my debt.’ Only then does Ferguson arrive at the chief reason for his letter: a heartfelt expression of thanks for all Carlyle and his other friends had done to fight off an attempt to deprive him of his moral philosophy professorship after he had gone to Europe as a travelling tutor without permission. Several of Ferguson’s other extant letters to Carlyle are also charming and amusing.
98 Merolle, 1:3.
99 Ibid., 1:11–12.
100 Ibid., 1:12. Also in The Correspondence of Adam Smith, ed. Ernest Campbell Mossner and Ian Simpson Ross, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 14–16.
101 Merolle, 1:31. Two weeks earlier Hume had written to Lord Elibank about this incident for the same purpose, without the slightest hint of humour: ‘I happened to tell Jack Dalrymple, that I intended to write to your Lordship. He is very anxious to stand right in your good Opinion; and desird me to put in a true Light to you a late Story, which, he says, had been misrepresented in some Letters to Scotland. It is the Story of his Combat with Hugh Dalrymple. As far as I knew that Affair (& I heard most of it from the first hand) Jack did nothing but what was honourable & prudent: The other the contrary. It woud only tire you to enter into particulars; & therefore I shall say nothing farther of the Subject. You will hear the Story from many hands.’ Hume to Lord Elibank, 2 April 1759, in Ernest Campbell Mossner, ‘New Hume Letters to Lord Elibank, 1748–1776’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 4 (1962): 431–60, quoting 449.
102 In his letter to Elliot of 19 March 1758, Ferguson had referred to ‘the Paper you saw’, then called ‘a Dissertation on the Vicissitudes incident to Human Society’ (Merolle, 1:27). It is thought to be an early draft of what Hume would soon call ‘his Treatise on Refinement’ (Hume to Adam Smith, 12 April 1759, Hume Letters, 1:304) and would later become An Essay on the History of Civil Society.
103 Merolle, 1:37.
104 Ibid., 1:38. Other examples of Ferguson’s humour, in letters, unpublished essays, and practical jokes, are discussed in Hill, Adam Ferguson and Ethical Integrity, 35–7.
105 Merolle, 1:38.
106 Ibid., 1:42–3.
107 Ferguson’s statement refutes Raynor’s imaginary hypothesis that Ferguson might have turned over the commission to write Sister Peg to Hume because he was ‘busy writing his lectures in natural philosophy (a subject he knows little about)’ (see note 47 above). Ferguson had already given his natural philosophy course for the first time in the 1759–60 session, and even as he prepared to do so, his letter to Gilbert Elliot of 14 September 1759 makes it clear that he was not too busy to continue agitating for a militia. When he undertook Sister Peg in August 1760, several months before the beginning of the new academic year, he would have had plenty of time for both activities, and his letter to Elliot of 6 November shows that he was able to balance the demands of teaching natural philosophy and writing about the militia for the press even after the new term began.
108 Although clearly dated, these letters to Shelburne were inserted into the ‘Undatable Letters’ section at the end of the second volume of Merolle’s edition of Ferguson’s correspondence because of their late arrival. At the time of Merolle’s edition they were housed in Acc. 11138 in the National Library of Scotland, but they have since been reclassified as MS 23638, fols. 69–70 and 71–2.
109 Merolle, 2:533.
110 Ibid., 2:534.
111 These newspaper letters are discussed in Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, 115–17. But without access to Ferguson’s letters to Shelburne from early 1762, Robertson had no way of knowing of Ferguson’s apparent involvement with them.
112 Edinburgh Evening Courant, 13 and 20 January 1762, as reprinted in the January 1762 issue of the Scots Magazine, 24: 8–11 (also reprinted in the Edinburgh Magazine, 6:13–16). On Thurot, who landed on Islay in mid-February 1760 and was killed later that month in an encounter with the British navy, see Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, esp. 105–7, 109.
113 The letter of 13 January singles out ‘the folly and presumption of narrow-minded men, who pretend to lead factions in the state, that they may be made to stand forth’ (Scots Magazine, 24:10). The letter of 20 January is more explicit: ‘We know very well by whose influence the Scottish militia-bill was rejected; by the influence of those ministers, who so long and so strenuously opposed the English militia, and, though forced to yield to the torrent of a free people, retained their inveterate animosity, and endeavoured to give a stab to the militia of England through the naked side of Scotland’ (Scots Magazine, 10–11).
114 Carlyle’s Plain Reasons, 12, had also cited the Cappadocians in the era of ancient Rome as the model of a people who rejected the offer of liberty because they could not defend it with arms.
115 Edinburgh Evening Courant, 13 Feb. 1762, reprinted in Scots Magazine 24 (January 1762): 14–16.
116 In his letter of 3 February 1762, Ferguson played down the importance of immediately gaining a militia for Scotland, emphasising instead the need to think about and dispute the issue, leading eventually to attainment of the goal: ‘The next best thing to the procuring of Actual Political Establishments for this purpose is turning the Attentions & desires of men to such Establishments & to make them think & disspute about them. … We shall at least by returning frequently put them [Politicians] to their Shifts for Evasions & this too in my Philosophy is doing a good thing. So that you see I am not hard to please on the Article of Success. I woud willingly hope however that we may prevail some time or Other’ (Merolle, 2:533). Although Ferguson did not mention it in this letter, the context for his defensive posture was the growing manpower shortage in Scotland after so many years of men being recruited to fight in the Seven Years’ War. On 8 February the Edinburgh Evening Courant published a letter which acknowledged the virtues of a militia but asked that it be put off ‘till we have recovered our waste of hands, and till the price of labour is abated’. The response to that letter in the Courant on 15 February, very possibly by Ferguson, backs off from the previous arguments for a Scots militia in a manner consistent with Ferguson’s letter to Shelburne of 3 February, this time by making a distinction between ‘an application’ for a militia law and ‘the actual execution of such a law’: what was needed was a law giving Scotland the ‘privilege’ of establishing a militia, so that it would be possible to implement it whenever ‘the threatenings of an enemy’ or another crisis made it necessary (Scots Magazine, 24 [February 1762]: 75–6). For a different view, which holds that the position expressed in the letter to the Courant of 15 February 1762 was not essentially a response to a specific set of circumstances at the end of the Seven Years’ War but rather indicative of the true and enduring beliefs of Ferguson and his Moderate associates, who cared more about the Scots militia as an ideal and a ‘privilege’ than as an institution to be realised, see Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, 117, 160, 174, 183, 185, 242. Similarly, Robertson sees the Poker Club as essentially a social institution (185–6), as I agree that it seems to have been for Hume, but not for Ferguson, Carlyle, and other zealous militia agitators. See the article on the Poker Club by Richard B. Sher in the ODNB.
117 Hume Letters, 1:410–11. In the same spirit, on 20 July 1765 Hume would write to another Poker Club friend, Hugh Blair, that Louis, Dauphin of France (1729–65) ‘seems a reasonable Man, but woud be the better of being roasted sometimes in the Poker’ (1:514).
118 Merolle, 2:533. In Sister Peg, when the Lowlands were occupied by Jacobites during the ’45, ‘Margaret threw her poker at them as they passed, with an air of great bitterness and vexation, yet John [Bull] took it in his head that it was all her doing’ (SPR, 57; SPL2, 37). In a note, Raynor remarks of this passage, without further evidence, ‘Hence the origin of the name “Poker Club”’ (SPR, 110 n. 32). Possibly, but since Carlyle reports in two different places that Ferguson was responsible for suggesting the name ‘Poker’ for the club – Carlyle, Autobiography, 439, and preface to the Poker Club minutes, quoted in Davis D. McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement: A Survey of Eighteenth-Century Literary Clubs and Societies ([Pullman]: Washington State University Press, 1969), 166 – Peg’s throwing her ‘poker’ may be regarded as more evidence that Ferguson wrote Sister Peg.
119 John Robertson, ‘The Scottish Enlightenment at the Limits of the Civic Tradition’, in Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 137–78, esp. 171–6; Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 211–12; SPR, 9.
120 On the tension in Hume between his pronouncements about militias in his essays and the paucity of evidence about his commitment to a Scots militia in his own day, see Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, 60–74.
121 SPR, 26.
122 Hume to Sir Gilbert Elliot, Lord Minto (1693–1766), 1 May 1760, Hume Letters, 1:325.
123 Ibid., 2:211–12.
124 See Mossner, Life of David Hume, 553; Ben Dew, ‘Waving a Mouchoir à la Wilkes: Hume, Radicalism and the North Briton’, Modern Intellectual History 6 (2009): 235–60, esp. the sources cited at 236 n. 3.
125 See Rhona Brown, ‘Wilkes and Scottish Liberty: The Reception of John Wilkes in the Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement’, in Before Blackwood’s: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Alex Benchimol, Rhona Brown, and David Shuttleton (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015), 47–62, esp. 56–7, on a poem published in February 1769 that is highly critical of Wilkes’s dependence on ‘the laurels of the mob’.
126 Mackenzie, Life of John Home, 27–8.
127 Donald W. Livingston, Philosophical Melancholy and Delirium: Hume’s Pathology of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 413 n. 27.
128 See the following comments in Mackenzie’s Life of John Home: ‘He [Home] had written an Essay, of which I have seen considerable detached pieces, on the Character of Cornelius and Sempronius Gracchus, of Cleomenes and Agis, and the Republican Form of Government’ (32); ‘on the backs, or blank interstices of the papers containing some of his earliest composed sermons, there are passages of poetry’ (33); ‘I have in my possession part of a scroll of answers to the observations of some friendly critic, on the play of Agis, the first production of Mr Home’s tragic muse. … from the fragment which remains, Mr Home seems to have availed himself of the remarks of his friend, in several particulars’ (34); ‘From certain notes and hints, relating to this tragedy [Douglas], in my possession, it appears to have undergone material alteration from the original design’ (35–6); ‘I am possessed of a journal [by Home] of this expedition [from Morpeth in Northumberland to London and Bath with Hume, in April 1776]’ (64; this manuscript journal is discussed and reproduced in Mackenzie’s Appendix, 165–6, 168–82, along with many letters from Hume and others, furnished to Mackenzie by Home’s nephew, also named John Home [123]).
129 A biography of Home by an anonymous ‘near relative’ in New Monthly Magazine 57 (1839): 289–304 and 471–83, and 58 (1840): 164–76, mentions some of Home’s manuscripts from this period to which he had access, including a stash titled ‘Letters Political published in the Newspapers’ that he termed ‘as various in their style as in their subjects’ (303). The manuscripts have not survived, and we do not know the printed pieces to which they correspond.
130 Carlyle, Autobiography, 441.
131 Journal entry for 31 April 1776, in Mackenzie, Life of John Home, 181–2.
132 David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller, rev. ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1987), quoting 263, 275–6. Hume’s arguments are discussed in Maria Pia Paganelli and Reinhard Schumacher, ‘The Vigorous and Doux Soldier: David Hume’s Military Defence of Commerce’, History of European Ideas 44 (2018): 1141–52. However, Paganelli and Schumacher provide no evidence for their contention that ‘for Hume the military consists in a militia’ (1145). On the contrary, it seems clear that the ideas about military defence in ‘Of Commerce’ and ‘Of Refinement in the Arts’ grew out of Hume’s experiences with British and French armies (not militias) during the War of Austrian Succession. As John B. Stewart observes in Opinion and Reform in Hume’s Political Philosophy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), Hume, despite his preference for militias in ideal commonwealths, ‘rules out reliance on a militia’ in internationally engaged commercial nations such as Great Britain (240, 289).
133 M. A. Box, David Harvey, and Michael Silverthorne, ‘A Diplomatic Transcription of Hume’s “Volunteer Pamphlet” for Archibald Stewart: Political Whigs, Religious Whigs, and Jacobites’, Hume Studies 29 (2003): 223–66, quoting 236.
134 Ibid., 237.
135 Principal Heads of a Speech, Advertisement.
136 Andrew Millar to Andrew (later Sir Andrew) Mitchell (1708–71), 15 April 1760, in Budd, Circulating Enlightenment, 230; Michael Fry’s revision of J. A. Hamilton’s account of Robert Dundas in the ODNB. On Dundas’s close connection with Newcastle and Hardwicke, see Edith Haden Guest’s entry on Dundas in History of Parliament, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1754-1790/member/dundas-robert-1713-87 (accessed 21 June 2021), the Hardwicke-Dundas correspondence in the Dundas of Arniston Papers in the National Register of Archives, and the Hardwicke Papers in the British Library. Hardwicke’s remark in a letter to Dundas of 13 November 1760 – ‘It gives me the greatest pleasure to hear of the encrease of public approbation, which You meet with every day’ (NRAS 3246, vol. 36, courtesy of Rachel Hewitt) – is of particular interest, because it not only shows Hardwicke’s appreciation for Dundas’s loyal service (see also his congratulatory letters of 12 June and 31 Aug. 1760) but also reveals that the animosity towards Dundas in Scotland immediately after his speech during the Scots militia debate and his appointment as Lord President, as noted in the Advertisement to Principal Heads of a Speech, had begun to dissipate shortly before the appearance of Sister Peg.
137 An undated satirical handbill demonstrates the vitriol directed against ‘Bumbo’ in the era of Sister Peg, as it derides him for leaving Scotland defenceless in the face of threats from ‘French Munsies’ (a derogatory Scots word for Frenchmen) and for deserting his motherland: Speedily Will Be Published, The Genuine Speech of BUMBO, at the Trial of His Mother Margaret, (Commonly Called Pegg, Only Lawful Sister to John Bull,) Who Was Indicted at the Old Bailey for Carrying a Tuck in Her Walking-staff, to Defend Her against the Coleys, and the French Munsies. Non hæc, O Bumbo! dederas promissa parenti. (‘O Bumbo! These are not the promises you gave your parent(s)’, playing on the Aeneid, XI, 152: ‘Non hæc, O Palla! dederas promissa parenti’).
138 Carlyle, Autobiography, 335.
139 Ibid., 248, 327, 333–4; Sher, Church and University, 82–5.
140 Hume to John Clephane, 4 February 1752, Hume Letters, 1:164–5.
141 Brian Hillyard, ‘The Keepership of David Hume’, in For the Encouragement of Learning: Scotland’s National Library, 1689–1989, ed. Patrick Cadell and Ann Matheson (Edinburgh: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1989), 103–18. However, the evidence does not appear to support Raynor’s assertion that in the 1754 incident Dundas ‘slyly attempted to remove Hume from office’ (SPR, 21).
142 Carlyle, Autobiography, 371.
143 Ibid., 333–4.
144 See Sher, Church and University, 74–92; Ralph McLean, ed., John Home’s Douglas: A Tragedy, with Contemporary Commentaries (Glasgow: Humming Earth, 2010); Ronnie Young, ‘“Sympathetick Curiosity”: Drama, Moral Thought, and the Science of Human Nature’, in The Scottish Enlightenment and Literary Culture, ed. Ralph McLean, Ronnie Young, and Kenneth Simpson (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press 2016), 115–36, esp. 116–22.
145 Carlyle, Autobiography, 327.
146 Ibid., 244, 327, 427. On the remarkable Fletcher women who were part of the inner circle supporting John Home’s Douglas, see Katharine Glover, ‘The Female Mind: Scottish Enlightenment Femininity and the World of Letters. A Case Study of the Women of the Fletcher of Saltoun Family in the Mid-Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Scottish Historical Studies 25 (2005): 1–20. Although Eliza (or Betty) Wedderburn and her cousin Margaret Hepburn both died prematurely before the Scots militia movement gained traction, Milton’s other daughters, Margaret (Peg) Grant (1723–76) and Mary (Mally) Fletcher (1725–78), along with Miss Campbell of Carrick, were probably among the women who were in on the secret of Sister Peg.
147 Carlyle, Autobiography, 346. Raynor mentions this incident in the context of discussing Hume’s relations with patrons (SPR, 114 n. 57), but he does not seem to appreciate its significance for understanding the context in which Sister Peg emerged.
148 Carlyle, Autobiography, 335.
149 Ibid., 272, 419–20.
150 Ibid., 334–5; Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 2 (1790): Part 1, 54–5.
151 ‘Memoir of the Second President Dundas’, in ‘The Dundas Family Scrap Book’, arranged by Robert Dundas of Arniston, 1884, privately owned (courtesy of Rachel Hewitt).
152 Roger L. Emerson, An Enlightened Duke: The Life of Archibald Campbell (1682–1761), Earl of Ilay, 3rd Duke of Argyll (Kilkerran, UK: Humming Earth, 2013), Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), and Professors, Patronage and Politics: The Aberdeen Universities in the Eighteenth Century (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1992).
153 Sher, Church and University.
154 Frederick A. Pottle, James Boswell: The Earlier Years, 1740–1769 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 311–17, 330–41, 398–9, and The Literary Career of James Boswell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929); Paul T. Ruxin, ‘Dorando and the Douglas Cause’, Age of Johnson 20 (2010): 79–94.
155 ‘Memorial for John Donaldson, One of the Publishers of the Edinburgh Advertiser’, 13 July 1767, in The Legal Papers of James Boswell, vol. 1, 29 July 1766–11 November 1767, ed. Hugh M. Milne (Edinburgh: Stair Society, 2013), 336–43.
156 St James’s Chronicle, 1 August 1767.
157 Public Advertiser, 27 July 1767 and other newspapers.
158 According to Pottle, Literary Career of James Boswell, 241, the London Chronicle version of this paragraph (which I have been unable to trace) also included the words ‘Fact shewing the weakness of the Lord President in making such a noise about the incendiary letters’. The paragraph was credited to the London Chronicle, 5 December 1767, when reprinted in the appendix to the 1767 volume of the Scots Magazine (29:702) with an additional paragraph, presumably also by Boswell, which suggested, absurdly, that the publication of this ‘Dear Bumbo’ letter was occasioned by a passage in a pamphlet written on behalf of the Hamilton side.
159 As John Robertson has shown (Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, 113), Newcastle and Hardwicke made an example of Lord Auchinleck for having strongly supported the Scots militia agitation during this period, even requiring him to travel to London to apologise to Newcastle and make assurances about his future conduct. There is no way to know what effect this demeaning treatment may have had on Boswell, especially when contrasted with the opposite treatment accorded to Robert Dundas. On Auchinleck’s ongoing advice about the need for ‘cultivating the friendship of the Arniston family’ (especially Robert Dundas), and Boswell’s ongoing resistance to it, see for example Boswell’s journal entry for 13 March 1778, in Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778, ed. Charles McC. Weis and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 217.
160 Quoted in The General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1757–1763, ed. David Hankins and James J. Caudle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 435 n. 1, which surveys Boswell’s variable, but generally disagreeable, relationship with Robert Dundas.
161 Boswell Collection, Beinecke Library, Yale University, J 1.2 (Journal in Edinburgh, 12 November 1761–7 April 1762).
162 [George Dempster], Reasons for Extending the Militia Acts to the Disarmed Counties of Scotland (1760); Sir James Fergusson, ed., Letters of George Dempster to Sir Adam Fergusson, 1756–1813 (London: Macmillan, 1934; repr. Glasgow: Grimsay Press, 2004), 75–6, 329–30, 332, 347; Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, passim. Among Boswell’s other friends in the Poker were Andrew Crosbie, whose friendship with Boswell is discussed in Richard B. Sher, ‘Scottish Divines and Legal Lairds: Boswell’s Scots Presbyterian Identity’, in New Light on Boswell, ed. Greg Clingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 28–55, esp. 40, and another advocate, William Nairne (1731–1811) (later Sir William Nairne and Lord Dunsinane of the Court of Session).
163 Fagg, Introduction, in Merolle, xxix–xxx. Boswell became friendly with Mountstuart (1744–1814), later first Marquess of Bute, while touring Italy in 1765 (see Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France, 1765–1766, ed. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955]). Mountstuart joined the Poker Club and in late 1775 sponsored in Parliament, with Dempster’s support, a Scots militia bill, which was killed in committee in March 1776. On 23 November 1775 Boswell made what he called in his journal ‘a vigorous harangue’ for a Scots militia at the Pantheon Society in Edinburgh, ‘as I thought it of consequence to rouse a general spirit for it’. He subsequently considered writing a pamphlet in support of the Scots militia (5 January 1776), defended the cause forcefully with Samuel Johnson and Lord Mansfield (16–17 March), and assisted Mountstuart with his speech on it (April). See Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–1776, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963], 186, 214, 267–9, 343; Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment and Militia Issue, 130–2.
164 James J. Caudle, ‘“Soaping” and “Shaving” the Public Sphere: James Boswell’s “Soaping Club” and Edinburgh Enlightenment Sociability’, in Association and Enlightenment: Scottish Clubs and Societies, 1700–1830, ed. Mark C. Wallace and Jane Rendall (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2021), 103–26, quoting 107.
165 Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), 300.
166 Pottle, Earlier Years, 313.
167 Pottle, Literary Career of James Boswell, 239–41, lists more than sixty-five articles on the Douglas Cause, Corsica, and other topics that Boswell contributed to the London Chronicle between 1 January and 5 December 1767.
168 Even when living in Edinburgh, Hume regularly read the London Chronicle, which ‘supplies me with all I want to know of the present Age’ (Hume to Strahan, 16 October 1769, New Hume Letters, 189; see also Hume to Strahan, 13 March 1770, Hume Letters, 2:218). In a letter of 20 July 1767 to John Crawford, Hume expressed his satisfaction that the Court of Session had sided with ‘the Hamilton Family, by the President’s casting Vote’, and characterised the activities of the Douglas side (most of which we now know to have been carried out by Boswell) as ‘the most violent Torrent of Prejudice that ever was heard of in a private Cause’ (New Hume Letters, 175). In a friendly letter to Carlyle of 15 September 1763, Hume had asked, ‘Pray is there any body such an Idiot at present as to be a Partizan of the Douglas?’ (Hume Letters, 1: 398), which Raynor cites as evidence that ‘Hume did not think highly of Carlyle’, because ‘Hume would have known that Carlyle was a zealous supporter of the Douglas claim’ (SPR, 6 and 31 n. 20). It is true that Carlyle, along with Ferguson, ‘favoured Douglas’ (Carlyle, Autobiography, 538), as did Lord Kames, Lord Monboddo, Lord Auchinleck, and others who were not idiots. But Raynor provides no evidence that Carlyle was ‘zealous’ in his support for Douglas, or that Hume would have known where Carlyle stood on this issue in September 1763, when the dispute had barely begun. Nor is it consistent with what we know of Hume for him to have used such insulting language in his letter if he had any idea of Carlyle’s position.
169 National Library of Scotland, MS 23764, fols. 166–7 (handwriting analysis courtesy of Ralph McLean). Nicholas Phillipson, ‘Dalrymple, Sir John, of Cousland [afterwards Sir John Hamilton-Macgill-Dalrymple], Fourth Baronet’, ODNB, is the source of all biographical information below that is not otherwise referenced. Dalrymple’s name change occurred late in life as a result of the inheritance from his marriage to a rich heiress in October 1760.
170 A paragraph in the letter about an edition of a work by John Milton establishes that North was the recipient (see the notes to that paragraph in the appendix).
171 Later the letter mentions having ‘informed John Hume [Home] of the contents of this Letter’.
172 Carlyle, Autobiography, 34.
173 Roger L. Emerson, ‘The Social Composition of Enlightened Scotland: The Select Society of Edinburgh, 1754–1764’, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 114 (1973): 291–329, esp. 324; Poker Club membership in Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, 188–91; Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh 1 (1788): 84.
174 Carlyle, Autobiography, 337; Sher, Church and University, 84.
175 Carlyle, Autobiography, 356.
176 Murdoch, ‘People Above’, 61.
177 [Sir John Dalrymple], The Appeal of Reason to the People of England, on the Present State of Parties in the Nation (London, 1763), 25.
178 Ibid., 36.
179 Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, 106 and 122 n. 19.
180 A. A. Tait, The Landscape Garden in Scotland, 1735–1835 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1980), 45–6; Richard B. Sher, ‘“Those Scotch Imposters and Their Cabal”: Ossian and the Scottish Enlightenment’, Man and Nature/L’homme et la nature: Proceedings of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 1, edited by Roger L. Emerson, Gilles Girard, and Roseann Runt (London, ON: University of Western Ontario, 1982), 55–63; and Sher, Church and University, 242–61, esp. 257–8.
181 His speech against the Booksellers’ Bill – an unsuccessful attempt by the leaders of the London book trade to protect their traditional right of perpetual ownership of literary property against the principle of limited, statutory copyright – was described in the London newspapers as ‘a long laboured speech, composed chiefly of a phillipic on the London news-paper printers … and a tedious fulsome panegyric on the King, Lords, and Commons, and the said Sir John Dalrymple himself’ (Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 11 May 1774, and other newspapers).
182 Although I have not yet located a newspaper advertisement for the first edition, ‘General Burgoyne’s Speech on Lord North’s Conciliating Proposition Respecting America’, appended to the third edition, is dated 28 February 1775.
183 [Sir John Dalrymple], The Address of the People of Great-Britain to the Inhabitants of America (London, 1775), 4–5.
184 Edinburgh Evening Courant, 15 July 1775. In the appendix to the third edition of Common Sense (1776), Thomas Paine declared that ‘Sir John Dalrymple, the putative father of a whining jesuitical piece, fallaciously called, “The Address of the people of ENGLAND to the inhabitants of AMERICA,” … ought to be considered … as one, who hath not only given up the proper dignity of man, but sunk himself beneath the rank of animals, and contemptibly crawls through the world like a worm.’ In The Crisis, 4 October 1780 (‘The Crisis Extraordinary’), Paine would affirm that Dalrymple’s pamphlet had been ‘dispersed in America in the year 1775’, adding: ‘How little did Sir John Dalrymple know of the abilities of America!’ Quoted in Paine: Collected Writings, ed. Eric Foner (New York: Library of America, 1995), 47, 246.
185 Fagg, Introduction, in Merolle, 1:l. When thanking John Home in a letter of 27 January 1776, Ferguson commented: ‘I had a line from Sir John Dalrimple Last night in which he tells me that Sr Grey Cooper [c. 1726–81, a supporter of North in the government] upon making his application found the affair was already done & wished me joy’ (Merolle, 1:133). This note shows that Dalrymple continued to promote Ferguson in London and was one of Ferguson’s correspondents, although none of their correspondence has been located.
186 [Adam Ferguson], Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Price, Intitled, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America, &c, in a Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to a Member of Parliament (London, 1776); Sher, Church and University, 264–7. Price’s pamphlet was published during the second week of February, and Ferguson’s manuscript was submitted to Sir Grey Cooper a little more than a month later, as we know from Cooper’s letter to Ferguson of 23 March 1776 indicating that he had sent it to William Strahan for printing and anonymous publication (Merolle, 1:137).
187 See Sher, Church and University, 262–76. On the Poker Club during the American War, see Robertson, Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue, chap. 5, and a chart of the club’s only surviving attendance records, from 16 November 1774–30 January 1784, compiled by Jeremy Cater (Edinburgh University Library, Dc.5.126*). Dalrymple, Ferguson, Home, and Carlyle were all active in the club during this period, especially in 1775–76. Hume attended no meetings of the Poker during the period from the club’s revival until his death in August 1776.
188 Although the work appeared anonymously, Tytler identified himself by signing the preface. Kames had been his patron, responsible for his appointment as joint professor of universal history in the University of Edinburgh in 1780.
189 Photocopied letter book of Alexander Fraser Tytler, National Library of Scotland, Acc. 3639, vol. 2, fols. 213–14.
190 Adam Ferguson to Carlyle Bell, 21 July 1810 (Merolle, 2:513).
191 [Alexander Fraser Tytler], Supplement to the Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames (Edinburgh, 1809), 18. Tytler erred in regarding Sister Peg as a publication sponsored by the Poker Club, which was established more than a year later.
192 Alexander Fraser Tytler, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Honourable Henry Home of Kames, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 1814), 1:254–5.
193 James A. Harris, Hume: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 546 n. 3; Robel, ‘David Hume, John Bull et Sister Peg’, 168.
194 Craig Smith, Adam Ferguson and the Idea of Civil Society: Moral Science in the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 19, 21, 134, 197.
195 John Lee, ‘Adam Ferguson’, Supplement to the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 6 vols. (Edinburgh: Archibald Constable, 1824), 4:239–43.
196 Catalogue of the Extensive & Valuable Collection of Manuscripts and Autograph Letters of Eminent Personages, of the Late Rev. John Lee, D.D., Principal of the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1861), 26.
197 Sequel to the Gift of a Grandfather (Edinburgh, 1839), 14.
198 Mark J. Hill and Mikko Tolonen, ‘A Computational Investigation into the Authorship of Sister Peg’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 54 (2021): 861–85, quoting 862.
199 Robel, ‘David Hume, John Bull et Sister Peg’, 151–2.
200 On John Home’s friendship with the Earl of Bute, see Richard B. Sher, ‘“The Favourite of the Favourite”: John Home, Bute and the Politics of Patriotic Poetry’, in Lord Bute: Essays in Re-interpretation, ed. Karl W. Schweizer ([Leicester]: Leicester University Press, 1988), 181–212.
201 Robertson received a stipend of about £75 per annum as the minister of the East Lothian parish of Gladsmuir (located less than ten miles from Dalrymple’s home at Cranstoun) from 1744 until his translation to a church in Edinburgh in 1758. By 1764 his income had increased to £500 a year, from his offices as a minister (£139), one of his Majesty’s chaplains-in-ordinary (£50), principal of the University of Edinburgh (£111), and historiographer royal for Scotland (£200), in addition to £600 for his History of Scotland (1759). See Sher, Church and University, 95, 122–3.
202 Robertson owed a great deal to government patronage and supported North’s American policy (ibid., 263, 270).
203 Along with his brother Francis Seymour Conway (1718–94), Earl (later first Marquess) of Hertford, Henry Seymour Conway (1719–95), MP and former general, had been responsible for Hume’s appointment as under-secretary of state in 1767 and for Hume’s pension augmentation (from £400 to £600) after he left office early in 1768 (Mossner, Life of David Hume, 494, 534, 555). The sentence which follows shows that Dalrymple was unaware that Hume’s pension had been increased, and he also appears not to have realised that General Conway opposed North’s American policies. On Adam Smith’s tutoring of, and relationship with, the Duke of Buccleuch, see Brian Bonnyman, The Third Duke of Buccleuch and Adam Smith: Estate Management and Improvement in Enlightenment Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
204 On the management of the press by Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745), first Earl of Orford, while prime minister, see Simon Targett, ‘“The Premier Scribbler Himself”: Sir Robert Walpole and the Management of Political Opinion’, Studies in Newspaper and Periodical History 2 (1994): 19–33.
205 Robert Harley (1661–1724), first Earl of Oxford, employed Jonathan Swift and others to write in support of his Tory government during the reign of Queen Anne, and Swift, Henry St John, first Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751), Matthew Prior (1664–1721), and others produced the Tory newspaper The Examiner from 1710 to 1714. Joseph Addison (1672–1719) published fifty-five numbers of The Free-Holder, or Political Essays in 1715–16 to support orthodox Whig principles. See J. A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propaganda and Public Opinion in the Age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Joseph Addison, The Freeholder, ed. James Leheny (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
206 Or possibly ‘abased’.
207 James Hampton (1721–78), Church of England clergyman, had published translations of Polybius between 1741 and 1761. At this time he may not have been as poor as Dalrymple suspected, since in addition to a wealthy Yorkshire rectory, Moor Monkton, in 1775 he secured Folkton as an additional sinecure rectory (ODNB).
208 John Douglas (1721–1807), then a Canon of Windsor, later Bishop of Salisbury, was a Scot who attended Bailliol College, Oxford, and made his way in the Church of England with patronage from William Pulteney, first Earl of Bath (1684–1764). He was well connected with the London booksellers, serving them and prospective authors as a literary intermediary, and it is unlikely that he valued political pamphleteering more than great works of literature, as Dalrymple claims. The resentment that Dalrymple expresses in this letter about the ‘wealth & fame’ obtained by Hume and Robertson from their ‘great books’ (i.e., Hume’s History of England and Robertson’s History of the Reign of Charles the Fifth) probably derived in large part from the relatively unfavourable reception and terms of publication accorded to the first two volumes of his own Memoirs of Great Britain and Ireland (1771–73). Hume attacked the first volume for containing ‘not one new Circumstance of the least Importance from the beginning to the End of the Work’ (Hume to Strahan, 11 March 1771, Hume Letters, 2:238). Douglas expressed a somewhat more favourable view in a letter to Alexander Carlyle of 6 April 1771 (Edinburgh University Library, Dc.4.41), although he acknowledged that Dalrymple’s book had been rushed into print with many errors. According to Douglas, Dalrymple ‘was offered £750 for his Memoirs’ from William Strahan and his publishing partner, Thomas Cadell (1742–1802), ‘but as he demanded £1500, the work is now published on his own Account’ (i.e., self-published). Strahan confirmed the offer of £750 to Hume after Dalrymple boasted that he had been offered £2000, which Hume did not believe (Hume Letters, 2:238 n. 2). By contrast, Hume and Robertson each received thousands of pounds for their best-selling histories (see Sher, Enlightenment and the Book).
209 Dalrymple refers to the folio edition of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, published by subscription by the brothers Robert and Andrew Foulis of Glasgow in 1770, and self-consciously modelled on their acclaimed editions of Homer in 1756 and 1758. See Brian Hillyard, ‘The Glasgow Homer’, in The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vol. 2, Enlightenment and Expansion, 1707–1800, ed. Stephen W. Brown and Warren McDougall (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 70–80, esp. 79.
210 Although Dalrymple was not a subscriber (as Hume was), the book was also available for sale at this time: forty-one copies of the demy (or large paper) version and ninety-two copies of the foolscap version are listed in A Catalogue of Books, Being the Entire Stock in Quires of the Late Messieurs Robert and Andrew Foulis (Glasgow, 1777) (see Philip Gaskell, A Bibliography of the Foulis Press, 2nd ed. [Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies, 1986], nos. 510 and 614). It appears that Dalrymple purchased two large-paper copies for one guinea each and had them handsomely bound for the King and Lord North. An extant copy with a multi-coloured gilt morocco binding and North’s armorial bookplate (https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1770-paradise-lost-john-milton-foulis-1851079445, accessed 21 June 2021) seems to fit the description of the copy that Dalrymple intended for North, but it is unclear what happened to the copy intended for the King, who already had a beautifully bound copy inscribed by the Edinburgh bookbinder James Scott, now in the King’s Library in the British Library (http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/bookbindings/LargeImage.aspx?RecordId=020-000015682&ImageId=ImageId=55200&Copyright=BL, accessed 21 June 2021). Like the copy of Sister Peg that he had given to North earlier, such gifts were apparently viewed by Dalrymple as a means of securing government patronage.