carefully wrapped up, so protected from a breath of air, that his estate, when he came to possess it, was no enjoyment to him; in like manner is the seclusion of princes from the people injurious to them, infecting their moral vigor, and contracting the action of the heart. I do not blame any attachment in which pity and generosity are concerned. But

if you commiserate the Stuarts, spare at least the nation which rose in arms for their defence, and whose shouts of enthusiasm you might almost have heard at Lichfield.

Johnson. I heard them nearer; but no more on that. Prejudices I may have; for what man is without them? but mine, sir, are not such as tend to the relaxation of morals, the throwing down of distinctions, the withholding of tribute to whom tribute is due, honor to whom honor. You and your tribe are no more favorable to liberty than I am. The chief difference is, and the difference is wide indeed, that I would give the larger part of it to the most worthy, you to the most unworthy. I would exact a becoming deference from inferiors to superiors; and I would not remove my neighbor's land-mark, swearing in open court that there never was any but an imaginary line between the two parties. Depend upon it, if the time should come when you gentlemen of the hustings have persuaded the populace that they may hoot down and trample on men of integrity and information, you yourself will lead an uncomfortable life, and they a restless and profitless one. No man is happier than he who, being in a humble station, is treated with affability and kindness by one in a higher. Do you believe that any opposition, any success, against this higher can afford the same pleasure? you do, little have you lived among the people whose cause you patronize, little know you of their character and nature. We are happy by the interchange of kind offices, and even by the expression of goodwill. Heat and animosity, contest and conflict, may sharpen the wits, although they rarely do; they never strengthen the understanding, clear the perspicacity, guide the judgment, or improve the heart.

IX. DAVID HUME AND JOHN HOME.

Hume. We Scotchmen, sir, are somewhat proud of our families and relationships: this is however a nationality which perhaps I should not have detected in myself, if I had not been favored with the flattering present of your tragedy. Our names, as often happens, are spelled differently; but I yielded with no reluctance to the persuasion that we are, and not very distantly, of the same stock.

Home. I hope, sir, our mountains will detain you among them some time, and I presume to promise you that you will find in Edinburgh a society as polished and literate as in Paris.

As literate I can easily believe, my cousin, and perhaps as polished, if you reason upon the ingredients of polish; but there is certainly much more amenity and urbanity at Paris than anywhere else in the world, and people there are less likely to give and take offence. All topics may be discussed without arrogance and superciliousness: an atheist would see you worship a stool or light a candle at noon without a sneer at you; and a bishop, if you were welldressed and perfumed, would argue with you calmly and serenely, though you doubted the whole Athanasian creed.

Home. So much the worse: God forbid we should ever experience this lukewarmness in Scotland!

for which rea

Hume. God, it appears, has forbidden it; son, to show my obedience a submission, I live as much as possible in France, where at present God has forbidden no such thing.

Home. Religion, my dear sir, can alone make men happy and keep them so.

Hume. Nothing is better calculated to make men happy than religion, if you will allow them to manage it according to their minds; in which case the strong men hunt down others until they can fold them, entrap them, or noose them. Here, however, let the discussion terminate. Both of us have been in a cherry orchard, and have observed the advantages of the jacket, hat, and rattle.

Home. Our reformed religion does not authorize any line of conduct diverging from right reason: we are commanded by it to speak the truth to all men.

Hume. Are you likewise commanded to hear it from all men?

Home. Yes, let it only be proved to be truth.

Hume. I doubt the observance: you will not even let the fact be proved; you resist the attempt; you blockade the preliminaries. Religion, as you practise it in Scotland, in some cases is opposite to reason and subversive of happiness. Home. In what instance?

Hume. If you had a brother whose wife was unfaithful to him without his suspicion; if he lived with her happily; if he had children by her; if others of which he was fond could be proved by you, and you only, not to be his, what would you do?

Home. Oh the harlot! we have none such here, excepting the wife indeed (as we hear she is) of a little lame bleareyed lieutenant, brought with him from Sicily, and bearing an Etna of her own about her, and truly no quiescent or intermittent one, which Mungo Murray (the apprentice of Hector Abercrombie) tells me has engulfed half the dissolutes in the parish. Of the married men who visited her, there was never one whose boot did not pinch him soon after, or the weather was no weather for corns and rheumatisms, or he must e'en go to Glasgow to look after a bad debt, the times being too ticklish to bear losses. I run into this discourse, not fearing that another philosopher will, like Empedocles, precipitate himself into the crater, but merely to warn you against the husband, whose intrepidity on entering the houses of strangers has caught many acute and wary folks. After the first compliments, he will lament to you that elegant and solid literature is more neglected in our days than it ever was. He will entreat you to recommend him to your bookseller; his own having been too much enriched by him had grown insolent. It is desirable that it should be one who could advance three or four guineas: not that he cares about the money, but that it is always best to have a check upon these people. You smile: he has probably joined you in the street already, and found his way into your study, and requested of you by the bye a trifling loan, as being

the only person in the world with whom he could take such

a liberty.

Hume. You seem to forget that I am but just arrived, and never knew him.

Home. That is no impediment: on the contrary, it is a reason the more. A new face is as inviting to him as to the mosquitoes in America. If you lend him a guinea to be rid of him, he will declare the next day that he borrowed it at your own request, and that he returned it the same evening.

Hume. Such men perhaps may have their reasons for being here; but the woman must be, as people say, like a fish out of water. Again to the question. Come now, if you had a brother, I was supposing, whose wife

Home. Out upon her! should my brother cohabit with her? Should my nephews be defrauded of their patrimony by bastards?

Hume. You would then destroy his happiness, and his children's; for, supposing that you preserved to them a scanty portion more of fortune (which you could not do), still the shame they would feel from their mother's infamy would much outweigh it.

Home. I do not see clearly that this is a question of religion.

Hume. All the momentous actions of religious men are referable to their religion, more or less nearly; all the social duties, and surely these are implicated here, are connected with it. Suppose again that you knew a brother and sister, who, born in different countries, met at last, ignorant of their affinity, and married.

Home. Poor, blind, sinful greatures! God be merciful to

them!

Hume. I join you heartily in the prayer, and would only add to it, Man be merciful to them also! Imagine them to have lived together ten years, to have a numerous and happy family, to come and reside in your parish, and the attestation of their prior relationship to be made indubitable to you by some document which alone could establish and record it: what would you do?

Home. I would snap asunder the chain that the devil had ensnared them in, even if he stood before me; I would implore God to pardon them, and to survey with an eye of mercy their unoffending bairns.

Hume. And would not you be disposed to behold them with an eye of the same materials?

Home. Could I leave them in mortal sin, a prey to the ensnarer of souls? No, I would rush between them as with a flaming sword; I would rescue them by God's help from perdition. Hume. What misery and consternation would this rescue bring with it!

Home. They would call upon the hills to cover them, to crush and extinguish their shame.

Hume. Those who had lived together in love and innocence and felicity? A word spoken to them by their pastor brings them into irremediable guilt and anguish. And you would do this?

Home. The laws of God are above all other laws: his ways are inscrutable: thick darkness covers his throne.

Hume. My cousin, you who have written so elegant and pathetic a tragedy cannot but have read the best-contrived one in existence, the Edipus of Sophocles.

Home. It has wrung my heart; it has deluged my eyes with weeping.

cause and excite

Hume. Which would you rather do,those sufferings, or assuage and quell them? Home. Am I a Scotchman or an islander of the Red Sea, that a question like this should be asked me?

Hume. You would not then have given to Edipus that information which drove him and Jocasta to despair?

Home. As a Christian and a minister of the gospel, I am commanded to defy the devil, and to burst asunder the bonds of sin.

Hume. I am certain you would be greatly pained in doing it.

Home. I should never overcome the grief and anxiety so severe a duty would cause me.

Hume. You have now proved, better than I could have done in twenty Essays, that, if morality is not religion, neither is religion morality. Either of them, to be good (and the one must be and the other should be so), will produce good effects from the beginning to the end, and be followed by no remorse or repentance.

It would be presumptuous in me to quote the Bible to you,