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This is certainly a remarkable letter to have been written by a youth little more than sixteen years old. If it had been written by one less distinguished by the [17]originality of his mature intellect, it might be looked upon as one of those illustrations of the faculty of imitation, for which some young persons display peculiar powers; but its grave and high-toned philosophical feeling is evidently no echo of other people's words, but the deeply felt sentiments of the writer. In some measure, perhaps, he deceived himself in believing that he had attuned his mind to pastoral simplicity, and had weeded it of all ambitious longings. If he had a sympathy with Virgil, it was not, as he has represented, with the poet's ideas of life, but with his realizations of it; not with the quiet sphere of a retired and unnoticed existence, but with the lustre of a well-earned fame. Through the whole, indeed, of the memorials of Hume's early feelings, we find the traces of a bold and far-stretching literary ambition; and though he believed that he had seared his mind to ordinary human influences, it was because this one had become so engrossing as to overwhelm all others. "I was seized very early," he tells us, in his 'own life,' "with a passion for literature, which has been the ruling passion of my life, and a great source of my enjoyments." Joined to this impulse, we find a practical philosophy partaking far more of the stoical than of that sceptical school with which his metaphysical writings have identified him; a morality of self-sacrifice and endurance, for the accomplishment of great ends. In whatever light we may view his speculative opinions, we gather from the habits of his life, and from the indications we possess of his passing thoughts, that he devotedly acted up to the principle, that his genius and power of application should be laid out with the greatest prospect of permanent advantage to mankind. He was an economist of all his talents from early youth: no memoir of a literary [18]man presents a more cautious and vigilant husbandry of the mental powers and acquirements. There is no instance of a man of genius who has wasted less in idleness or in unavailing pursuits. Money was not his object, nor was temporary fame; though, of the means of independent livelihood, and a good repute among men, he never lost sight: but his ruling object of ambition, pursued in poverty and riches, in health and sickness, in laborious obscurity and amidst the blaze of fame, was to establish a permanent name, resting on the foundation of literary achievements, likely to live as long as human thought endured, and mental philosophy was studied.
There is among Hume's papers a fragment of "An Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour." It is evidently a clean copy from a corrected scrawl, written with great precision and neatness, and no despicable specimen of caligraphy. From the pains that appear to have been bestowed on the penmanship, and from many rhetorical defects and blemishes which do not appear in any of his published works, it may be inferred that this is a production of very early years, and properly applicable to this period of his life; although its matured thought, and clear systematic analysis, might, in other circumstances, have indicated it as the fruit of a mind long and carefully cultivated. It is scarcely necessary to frame an excuse for quoting such a document on the present occasion. It could not be legitimately incorporated with his works; because, whatever is given to the public in that shape, is presumed to consist of those productions which the author himself, or those entitled to represent him, have thought fit to lay before the public, as the efforts by which the full stretch and compass of his intellectual powers are to be tested. From such [19]collections, the editor who performs his functions with a kind and respectful consideration for the reputation of the illustrious dead, will exclude whatever is characterized by the crudeness of youth, or the feebleness of superannuation. To the reputation of Hume it would be peculiarly unjust to publish among his acknowledged and printed works, any productions of extreme youth; because, from his earliest years to an advanced period of his life, his mind was characterized by constant improvement, and he was every now and then reaching a point from which he looked back with regret and disapprobation at the efforts of earlier years.
But in a biographical work, where the chief object is the tracing the history of the author's mind, not the representation of its matured efforts, these early specimens of budding genius have their legitimate place, and receive that charitable consideration for the circumstances in which they were written, which their author's reputation demands.
The essay commences with a sketch of the decline of virtue, and the prevalence of luxury among the Romans; and describes their possession of the arts which they had learned in their better days, when not seconded by bravery and enterprise, as furnishing, like the fine clothes of a soldier, a temptation to hostile cupidity. He then represents the conquerors adapting themselves, after the manner peculiar to their own barbarous state, to the habits and ideas of the civilized people whom they had subdued. He represents the conquered people as sunk in indolence, but imperfectly preserving the arts and elegancies transmitted to them by their ancestors; and the conquerors full of energy and activity, as the sources of whatever impulse was thereafter given to [20]thought or action. They "came with freshness and alacrity to the business; and being encouraged both by the novelty of these subjects and by the success of their arms, would naturally ingraft some new kind of fruit on the ancient stock." He then proceeds with the following train of reflections:—
"'Tis observable of the human mind, that when it is smit with any idea of merit or perfection beyond what its faculties can attain, and in the pursuit of which it uses not reason and experience for its guide, it knows no mean, but as it gives the rein, and even adds the spur, to every florid conceit or fancy, runs in a moment quite wide of nature. Thus we find, when, without discretion, it indulges its devote terrors, that working in such fairy-ground, it quickly buries itself in its own whimsies and chimeras, and raises up to itself a new set of passions, affections, desires, objects, and, in short, a perfectly new world of its own, inhabited by different beings, and regulated by different laws from this of ours. In this new world 'tis so possessed that it can endure no interruption from the old; but as nature is apt still on every occasion to recall it thither, it must undermine it by art, and retiring altogether from the commerce of mankind, if it be so bent upon its religious exercise, from the mystic, by an easy transition, degenerate into the hermite. The same thing is observable in philosophy, which though it cannot produce a different world in which we may wander, makes us act in this as if we were different beings from the rest of mankind; at least makes us frame to ourselves, though we cannot execute them, rules of conduct different from those which are set to us by nature. No engine can supply the place of wings, and make us fly, though the [21]imagination of such a one may make us stretch and strain and elevate ourselves upon our tiptoes. And in this case of an imagined merit, the farther our chimeras hurry us from nature, and the practice of the world, the better pleased we are, as valuing ourselves upon the singularity of our notions, and thinking we depart from the rest of mankind only by flying above them. Where there is none we excel, we are apt to think we have no excellency; and self-conceit makes us take every singularity for an excellency.
"When, therefore, these barbarians came first to the relish of some degree of virtue and politeness beyond what they had ever before been acquainted with, their minds would necessarily stretch themselves into some vast conceptions of things, which, not being corrected by sufficient judgment and experience, must be empty and unsolid. Those who had first bred these conceptions in them could not assist them in their birth, as the Grecians did the Romans; but being themselves scarce half civilized, would be rather apt to entertain any extravagant misshapen conceit of their conquerors, than able to lick it into any form. 'Twas thus that that monster of romantic chivalry, or knight-errantry, by the necessary operation of the principles of human nature, was brought into the world; and it is remarkable that it descended from the Moors and Arabians, who, learning somewhat of the Roman civility from the province they conquered, and being themselves a southern people, which are commonly observed to be more quick and inventive than the northern, were the first who fell upon this vein of achievement. When it was once broken upon it ran like wild-fire over all the nations of Europe, who, being in the same situation with these nations, kindled with the least spark.
[22]"What kind of monstrous birth this of chivalry must prove, we may learn from considering the different revolutions in the arts, particularly in architecture, and comparing the Gothic with the Grecian models of it. The one are plain, simple, and regular, but withal majestic and beautiful, which when these barbarians unskilfully imitated, they ran into a wild profusion of ornaments, and by their rude embellishments departed far from nature and a just simplicity. They were struck with the beauties of the ancient buildings; but, ignorant how to preserve a just mean, and giving an unbounded liberty to their fancy in heaping ornament upon ornament, they made the whole a heap of confusion and irregularity. For the same reason, when they would rear up a new scheme of manners, or heroism, it must be strangely overcharged with ornaments, and no part exempt from their unskilful refinements; and this we find to have been actually the case, as may be proven by running over the several parts of it."
