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and didactic novelists as the best guide to English history yet written, while amateur readers embraced its canonical status by including it in their autodidactic commonplace books, abridgements, and abstracts.” We can see much more clearly than we could have without assembling this evidence that Hume’s History of England “forced contemporary readers to negotiate for themselves Hume’s various critics, the ‘English, Scotch, and Irish, Whig and Tory, churchman and sectary, freethinker and religionist, patriot and courtier [who] united in their rage’ against him.” In coaching his readers in his light-handed way, Hume “helped fashion in them the sense of moderation, tolerance, and fair-mindedness that was crucial to polite readers in the Age of Enlightenment.”

      In chapter 5, we turn from Towsey’s eighteenth-century Scottish readers of Hume to “Reading Hume’s History of England: Audience and Authority in Georgian England.” Here, David Allan aims to go a step beyond recent research into the printed reception accorded Hume, asking “how those who did not feel compelled—or who simply lacked the opportunity—to cast their experiences as readers in published form responded” to Hume. We find that there were many readers indeed of Hume’s History in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England: Anglican clergymen, middling-sort professionals, merchants, industrialists, and men (and women) of the landed elite are all known to have had Hume’s History on their bookshelves. Those who did not own the History personally often had access to Hume’s text through its place on the shelves of library societies, circulating libraries, and other collections of books that were accumulated during this period. What did these various readers make of Hume’s text? Allan susses out surveying evidence in the form of annotations in surviving copies of Hume’s History while also exploring more extended encounters with Hume found in the pages of various commonplace books. It is here that Allan makes his most substantial findings. Commonplace books offer us a window on “sophisticated reflections on people’s experiences with texts.” Allan brings to light several key commonplace reflections of Hume. William Constable, a Catholic gentleman from Yorkshire, kept a volume entitled “Notebook of Extracts from Works of David Hume,” in which he appeared to be particularly interested in passages that “were capable of being read as comparatively well-disposed toward the traditional Catholic position.” Others who commonplaced Hume include Charles Lee, who considered Hume a “Monarchical Writer;” the Reverend James Gambier in Kent, who recorded in one passage that the “Spirit of Philosophy which animates his Work gives it a manifest Superiority over most of the English Histories by which it is preceeded”; and James Smith, “a Unitarian wool merchant from Norwich.” Hume’s History, Allan justifiably concludes, “is a rare example of a text with which it is possible to make meaningful progress” in our efforts to document the responses recorded by “long-lost early readers.”

      Towsey and Allan show us a range of contemporary British responses to Hume’s History of England, and in chapter 6, Jeffrey M. Suderman explains why it was that Hume’s early readers were often baffled by his narrative. In “Medieval Kingship and the Making of Modern Civility: Hume’s Assessment of Governance in The History of England,” Suderman argues that the “modern reader, already inclined to ignore Hume’s History in favor of his more overtly philosophical works, is tempted to pass lightly over the assessments of England’s kings scattered throughout the medieval volumes.” But Suderman rightly reminds us that these volumes “constituted the last major production of [Hume’s] literary career” and that it is here that we have “Hume’s most seasoned judgments on the nature of executive government.” This approach also allows Suderman to see “civility” as an overarching concern of Hume’s—one that encompassed “liberty,” a topic that scholars have given much attention to, but not in this context. Surveying Hume’s assessment of kings worthy (Alfred is the prime example) and reprehensible (John I, and to a lesser degree Richard III and Edward II, for instance), Suderman finds a story line centered on themes of liberty and tyranny. Hume seems to be saying, “If the want of liberty was the consequence of weak governance, then perhaps liberty itself, at least that which can be found in the medieval world, depended upon the efforts of bold and powerful monarchs.” Moreover, the “term ‘tyranny,’ if applied equally to innocent but powerless kings and to vigorous and innovative monarchs, can have little meaning.” Hume knew well that these terms had been “thrown about incautiously by party apologists”; as a philosophical historian, he would be more cautious and measured. Still, Hume’s assessment of those, like Edward, who fall between these extremes contains other lessons. Suderman’s reading makes good sense of several passages from the History that commentators have had difficulty interpreting; he finds that for Hume, “the most admirable monarchs in English history are to be found” in “barbarous ages,” when there was an “absence of a continuous rule of law.” In a “remarkable piece of philosophical detachment,” Hume “chastises Edward only for the unnecessary severity of his administrative style and the counterproductive assaults upon Scottish customs.” Suderman’s nuanced reading shows that “Hume seldom made direct comparisons of good and bad monarchs, effective and ineffective reigns.” Here, like in so much else that he wrote, Hume expected his readers to be active participants. Hume’s heroes “were not kings who bent tamely before a timeless constitution, but instead powerful, innovative, and aggressive kings who created the rule of law out of chaos.” What baffled his contemporary audience was that “Hume was retelling a Whig story with a Tory cast of characters.” Moreover, “Hume hoped that, by showing his audience how their modern freedoms had really been won, he could help spare them from the absolutism that had made such freedoms possible.”

      Like Suderman, F. L. van Holthoon sees Hume as a historian who aimed “to judge persons and events” in an effort to “learn from the past so that we do not become its prisoner.” In chapter 7, “Hume and the End of History,” van Holthoon identifies three ways in which scholars have interpreted the historical lessons of Hume’s History of England: “Hume as a neoclassical historian, the History as the product of a scientific Whig, and reason in history as the leading theme of Hume’s History.” Van Holthoon sketches the historiography related to each of those approaches, finding each has things to offer but suggesting an alternative approach in their stead. Drawing on his vast research into Hume’s revisions to the History, van Holthoon points our attention to a key change that Hume made at the conclusion to the history of the Stuarts. In the edition of 1757, Hume had first “presented his story as an antidote against Whig propaganda,” but by 1770, it had become “a cautionary tale against the risks of liberty to authority and the need to keep a balance between the two.” Another noteworthy passage informing van Holthoon’s assessment is Hume’s conclusion to the second volume on the Middle Ages, one also quoted by Suderman. Like Suderman, van Holthoon cautions that Hume scholars have too often looked to Hume’s History for its story of liberty. We are better served to think of it as “A Study of Authority,” with a prominent part being played by Elizabeth I, “Hume’s heroine.” When we approach the History from this perspective and in its entirety rather than piecemeal, seemingly troublesome passages fall into place. For instance, the “four appendices are like slides in a magic lantern,” each offering a stock-taking “of the functioning of authority in English history at certain moments in time.” We also see that although Hume “earned his reputation as a Tory historian because of his defense of Charles I,” like the other Stuarts, Charles did not have “the prudence and the skill to ensure stability,” and that is what led to 1688, “the end of history” for the English. These themes van Holthoon traces through Hume’s political and economic essays, showing that as a historical thinker and writer, “Hume had a remarkable unity of purpose,” and this is partly why “his History has stood the test of time.”

      Both van Holthoon and Suderman emphasize the importance of historical context in Hume’s scheme of historical judgment. In chapter 8, the late Claudia M. Schmidt has added to that developing image in her broad-ranging considerations in “David Hume as a Philosopher of History.” Providing a survey of the origins and

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