HKB
it in my power to do service to my friends--particularly to your young folks; for as to you and myself, it is long since we thought our fortunes entirely made."[287:1]
He was not, however, destined to fill this office; and neither he himself, nor his best friends, appear to have regretted the circumstance; the fact being that he was but slenderly endowed with either of the qualifications then indispensable to an Irish statesman,--a capacity for hard drinking, and adroitness in bold political intrigues. The exercise of an official function, among a people where one sect of Christians enjoyed all offices, emoluments, and honours, while another, following the national religion, were scarcely allowed to live, must have shocked his sense of political justice; while it may be questioned if he was a sufficiently bold politician to have attempted any reform of this abuse. The project of his appointment, however, was brought so near its consummation, as to elicit certain applications for ecclesiastical preferment, in order that the reputation he had achieved, in other places, for influence in this department of patronage, might not be unacknowledged in Ireland.[288:1]
In his letters to his friends, at this time, he describes these vicissitudes of fortune; and indulges in a feeling to which he was very prone,--an uncertainty as to his future projects, and an indolent disinclination to make up his mind how to act.
HUME to DR. BLAIR.
"Paris, 23d August, 1765.
"All the literati of my friends, who understand English, think your Dissertation one of the finest performances in our language. A gentleman, of my acquaintance, has translated it for his own satisfaction. He could not publish it without publishing "Ossian" at the same time. My scepticism extends no farther, nor ever did, than with regard to the extreme antiquity of those poems; and it is no more than scepticism.
"You may, perhaps, have heard of the rapid whirl of my fortune backwards and forwards of late. I had scarce received my commission, as secretary to the embassy, when I knew that that situation, the most agreeable in which I could have been placed, was not to last. Lord Hertford must go to Ireland, and resolved to carry me over as secretary to that kingdom, in conjoint commission with his son. On his arrival at London, he found the cry so loud against the promotion of Scotsmen, that he was obliged to give it up; which he did the more easily, as he knew my great reluctance to that office and scene of life. He has now got a pension of £400 a-year settled on me; and as he has prepared an apartment for me in the castle of Dublin, I shall hurry thither as soon as I leave France, and shall be afterwards free for the rest of my life.[289:1] I have not determined where I shall pass my latter days. This place should be the most agreeable to me; but a man who came late thither, and who is not supported by family connexions, may, perhaps, find himself misplaced, even in this centre of letters and good society. I have a reluctance to think of living among the factious barbarians of London; who will hate me because I am a Scotsman, and am not a Whig, and despise me because I am a man of letters. My attachment to Edinburgh revives as I turn my face towards it."[290:1]
HUME to his Brother.