DEAR SIR—­I confess I was once of the same opinion with you, and thought that the best period to begin an English History was about Henry the Seventh, but you will please to observe that the change which then happened in public affairs was very insensible, and did not display its influence for many years afterwards....  I am just now diverted for the moment by correcting my Essays, Moral and Political for a new edition.  If anything occur to you to be inserted or retrenched, I shall be obliged if you offer the hint.  In case you should not have the last edition by you I shall send you a copy of it....  I had almost lost your letter by its being wrong directed.  I received it late, which was the reason you got not sooner a copy of Joannes Magnus.[78]

On the 17th of December 1754 Hume gives Smith an account of his quarrel with the Faculty of Advocates, and his resolution to stay as librarian after all, for the sake of the use of the books, which he cannot do without, but to give Blacklock, the blind poet, a bond of annuity for the salary.  Three weeks later he writes again, and as the letter mentions Smith’s views on some historical subjects, it may be quoted:—­

     EDINBURGH, 9th January 1755.

DEAR SIR—­I beg you to make my compliments to the Society, and to take the fault on yourself if I have not executed my duty, and sent them this time my anniversary paper.  Had I got a week’s warning I should have been able to have supplied them.  I should willingly have sent some sheets of the History of the Commonwealth or Protectorship, but they are all of them out of my hand at present, and I have not been able to recall them.[79] I think you are extremely in the right that the Parliament’s bigotry has nothing in common with Hiero’s generosity.  They were themselves violent persecutors at home to the utmost of their power.  Besides, the Huguenots in France were not persecuted; they were really seditious, turbulent people, whom their king was not able to reduce to obedience.  The French persecutions did not begin till sixty years after.

Your objection to the Irish massacre is just, but falls not on the execution but the subject.  Had I been to describe the massacre of Paris I should not have fallen into that fault, but in the Irish massacre no single eminent man fell, or by a remarkable death.  If the elocution of the whole chapter be blamable, it is because my conceptions laboured most to start an idea of my subject, which is there the most important, but that misfortune is not unusual.—­I am, etc.[80]

In 1752 Smith was chosen a member of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, which, after an interregnum caused by the rebellion, was revived in that year, with David Hume for Secretary, and which was eventually merged in the Royal Society in 1784.  But we know of no part he took, if he took any, in its proceedings.  Of the Rankenian Society, again—­the famous