34, shews how wide-spread this prejudice was. The writer gives his 'real, fair, and substantial objections to the administration of this Scot [Lord Bute]. The first is, that he is a Scot. I am certain that reason could never believe that a Scot was fit to have the management of English affairs. A Scot hath no more right to preferment in England than a Hanoverian or a Hottentot.' In Humphry Clinker (Letter of July 13) we read:--'From Doncaster northwards all the windows of all the inns are scrawled with doggrel rhymes in abuse of the Scotch nation.' Horace Walpole, writing of the contest between the House of Commons and the city in 1771, says of the Scotch courtiers:--'The Scotch wanted to come to blows, and were at least not sorry to see the House of Commons so contemptible.' Memoirs of the Reign of George III, iv. 301. 'What a nation is Scotland,' he wrote at the end of the Gordon Riots, 'in every reign engendering traitors to the State, and false and pernicious to the kings that favour it the most.' Letters, vii. 400. See post, March 21, 1783. Lord Shelburne, a man of a liberal mind, wrote:--'I can scarce conceive a Scotchman capable of liberality, and capable of impartiality.' After calling them 'a sad set of innate cold-hearted, impudent rogues,' he continues:--'It's a melancholy thing that there is no finding any other people that will take pains, or be amenable even to the best purposes.' Fitzmaurice's Shelburne, iii. 441. Hume wrote to his countryman, Gilbert Elliot, in 1764:--'I do not believe there is one Englishman in fifty, who, if he heard I had broke (sic) my neck to-night, would be sorry. Some, because I am not a Whig; some, because I am not a Christian; and all, because I am a Scotsman. Can you seriously talk of my continuing an Englishman? Am I, or are you, an Englishman?' Elliot replies:--'Notwithstanding all you say, we are both Englishmen; that is, true British subjects, entitled to every emolument and advantage that our happy constitution can bestow.' Burton's Hume, ii. 238, 240. Hume, in his prejudice against England, went far beyond Johnson in his prejudice against Scotland. In 1769 he wrote:--'I am delighted to see the daily and hourly progress of madness and folly and wickedness in England. The consummation of these qualities are the true ingredients for making a fine narrative in history, especially if followed by some signal and ruinous convulsion--as I hope will soon be the case with that pernicious people.' Ib p. 431. In 1770 he wrote:--'Our government has become a chimera, and is too perfect, in point of liberty, for so rude a beast as an Englishman; who is a man, a bad animal too, corrupted by above a century of licentiousness.' Ib p. 434.
[887] 'The love of planting,' wrote Sir Walter Scott, 'which has become almost a passion, is much to be ascribed to Johnson's sarcasms.' Croker Corres. ii. 34. Lord Jeffrey wrote from Watford in 1833:--'What a country this old England is. In a circle of twenty miles from this spot (leaving out London and its suburbs), there is more old timber ... than in all Scotland.' Cockburn's Jeffrey, i. 348. See post, March 21, 1775.
[888] See Boswell's Hebrides, Aug. 20.
[889] Even David Hume subscribed to the fund. He wrote in 1760:--'Certain it is that these poems are in every body's mouth in the Highlands, have been handed down from father to son, and are of an age beyond all memory and tradition. Adam Smith told me that the Piper of the Argyleshire militia repeated to him all those which Mr. Macpherson had translated. We have set about a subscription of a guinea or two guineas apiece, in order to enable Mr. Macpherson to undertake a mission into the Highlands to recover this poem, and other fragments of antiquity.' Mason's Gray, ii. 170. Hume changed his opinion. 'On going to London,' writes Dr. A. Carlyle (Auto. p. 276), 'he went over to the other side, and loudly affirmed the poems to be inventions of Macpherson. I happened to say one day, when he was declaiming against Macpherson, that I had met with nobody of his opinion but William Caddel of Cockenzie, and President Dundas, which he took ill, and was some time of forgetting.' Gibbon, in the Decline and Fall (vol. i. ch. 6), quoted Ossian, but added:--'Something of a doubtful mist still hangs over these Highland traditions; nor can it be entirely dispelled by the most ingenious researches of modern criticism.' On this Hume wrote to him on March 18, 1776:--'I see you entertain a great doubt with regard to the authenticity of the poems of Ossian.... Where a supposition is so contrary to common sense, any positive evidence of it ought never to be regarded. Men run with great avidity to give their evidence in favour of what flatters their passions and their national prejudices. You are therefore over and above indulgent to us in speaking of the matter with hesitation.' Gibbon's Misc. Works, i. 225. So early as 1763 Hume had asked Dr. Blair for 'proof that these poems were not forged within these five years by James Macpherson. These proofs must not be arguments, but testimonies!' J.