View article

Really it is admirable how many Men of Genius this Country produces at present. Is it not strange that, at a time when we have lost our Princes, our Parliaments, our independent Government, even the Presence of our chief Nobility, are unhappy, in our Accent & Pronunciation, speak a very corrupt Dialect of the Tongue which we make use of; is it not strange, I say, that, in these Circumstances, we shou’d really be the People most distinguish’d for Literature in Europe?

The paradox of the Scottish Enlightenment that David Hume articulated in this private letter of 1757 may be extended to other aspects of eighteenthcentury Scottish life and culture. Hume’s litany of Scottish national losses—of king and court following the Union of Crowns in 1603, of an independent Scottish parliament following the parliamentary union of 1707, and of many of the higher nobility who set up residences in London during the eighteenth century, rarely if ever returning to their native land—might well have spelled disaster for a small, relatively poor nation situated along the northern periphery of Europe. Yet the eighteenth century in Scotland was the era not only of the brilliant efflorescence of literature and learning to which Hume referred but also of remarkable developments in agriculture and urban life, commerce and industry, religion and society, and much more. In the age when Scotland lost its sovereignty, its people asserted themselves with renewed vigour and acquired an unprecedented degree of international recognition for their achievements. If that accomplishment seemed ‘strange’to contemporaries, it appears no less extraordinary two and half centuries later.