Denkend aan Hume in Holland

The Nortons over Smith:

In A dictionary of members of the Dublin book trade, 1550-1800 : based on the records of the Guild of St. Luke the Evangelist, Dublin

via Misset on Almagor on Pierre de Maizeaux.

Via Mossners Continental Reception [34-35] weten we dat hij het samen deed met A. B. de la Chapelle, W. J. ’s Gravesande, L. de Jaucourt, P. Massuet en J. Rousset de Missy (o.a.)

bron: Greig’s Letters:

Hippolyte de Saujeon, Comtesse de Boufflers (for the ‘Rouverel’ was generally omitted), must be distinguished both from the Duchesse de Boufflers, a member of the Luxembourg family, and from the Marquise de Boufflers, mother of the celebrated chevalier of that name. All contemporary records are agreed in describing her as singularly beautiful in youth and middle age. When David Hume met her first, in 1763, she was thirty-nine, looked thirty, and had all the freshness of complexion of a girl of twenty. She had then been married since the year 1745. But we hear nothing of her husband till he died, in 1764. In 1751, Louis-Franá§ois de Bourbon (1717-76), Prince de Conti, had taken her as his principal mistress, and although this relationship had not endured many years, she still retained his friendship and still acted as his hostess in the Temple, his official residence in Paris, and at l’Isle Adam, his country house.
p xxiv
In addition to her beauty, she was noted for her wit, learning, literary judgement, and love of paradox. She read, wrote, and spoke English, and she led the Anglophiles in Paris. The public voice ascribed to her the authorship of two books, De l’amitié and Des passions. She denied this.† 1 There is no doubt, however, that she wrote plays, which she kept in manuscript and showed to special friends.
p xxiv
‘She is two women, the upper and the lower,’ says Horace Walpole. ‘I need not tell you that the lower is gallant, and still has pretensions. The upper is very sensible, too, and has a measured eloquence that is just and pleasing–but all is spoiled by an unrelaxing attention to applause. You would think she was always sitting for her picture to her biographer.’† 2
p xxiv
With this should be compared her own statement: ‘Je veux rendre á  la vertu par mes paroles ce que je lui á´te par mes actions.’† 3
p xxiv
It will be seen from Letter 1 in Appendix E that it was she who made the first approach in the friendship that grew up between her and David Hume. After corresponding intermittently for two and a half years, they met when Hume arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1763. Then ensued a relationship which is nearly as difficult to define as that between Horace Walpole and the old, blind and sharp-tongued Marquise du Deffand. That it passed the bounds of mere friendship is, I think, beyond doubt. Mme de Verdelin reported Hume ‘amoureux fou de Mme de B.’.† 1 Be that true or false, there are signs that at one time Mme de Boufflers tried her best to make him fall in love with her. The affair distracted, flattered, and at length frightened him; for it threatened what he cherished more than life itself–his independence. Even when under her spell, he felt it irksome; while she, for her part, enjoyed playing, now the coquette, now the femme savante, now the great lady far above him in the social scale, now the forsaken mistress, and now the humble pupil of her ‘maá®tre de philosophie et de morale’.
p xxv
By the summer of 1764 the situation had become difficult. Hume was very near surrendering completely, changing his nationality, and settling down for life in France as the acknowledged ‘friend’ of his divine countess.† 2 This must have been apparent to his real friends of long standing, when they met and talked with him. Hence Gilbert Elliot’s alarm in his letter of 15th September 1764 from Brussels. And Hume’s anxiety is given away by the quite unnecessary vehemence with which he answered.
p xxv
As it happened, a single unforeseen event changed the whole complexion of affairs. M. le Comte de Boufflers died. His widow then forgot everything that she had said to David Hume, and grew obsessed with one ambition–to marry her former lover, the Prince de Conti. This, it seems, helped to cure Hume of his infatuation, as it well might. For she now shamelessly made use of him as go-between. And by the time her hopes had nearly vanished–they never quite vanished till the Prince’s death in 1776–Hume was safely out of reach of her uncommon fascination.
p xxv
And he carefully remained out of reach. Though he had promised all his friends in Paris to return, as soon as he had settled Rousseau to his mind in England, he never did return; though he said that he disliked London and expressed contempt for the ‘Barbarians’ who dwelt in that town, he invented one excuse and then another for remaining in their midst. His excuses carry no conviction. For his unavowed reason was his fear of slipping once again under the spell of the divine countess.

Hume’s friendship with Henry Home, later Lord Kames, a man fifteen years his senior, probably dates from his undergraduate days in Edinburgh University, or from the period immediately following, when he was studying law. Through the correspondence arising from this friendship we learn of the title of a hitherto unknown pamphlet by Hume, published without his prior knowledge by Henry Home: A Letter from a Gentleman to his Friend at Edinburgh; containing some Observations on a Specimen of the Principles Concerning Religion and Morality, said to be maintained in a Book lately published intituled, A Treatise of Human Nature &c. The pamphlet is in defence of the religious and moral principles of the Treatise of Human Nature, which had been attacked by Principal Wishart of Edinburgh at the time when Hume was standing as candidate for the professorship of Ethics and Pneumatical Philosophy; it appeared anonymously at Edinburgh on 21 May 1745, and it has not yet come to light. We hope that other scholars may be more fortunate in tracing it, as it may well prove of philosophical significance.

uit de inleiding van.
New Letters of David Hume, [xiii]

Redacteur Algemene Konst en Letter-bode, voor meer en min-geoeffenden.

27-29 augustus 1790 kreeg de gildeknecht opdracht om ‘om te zeggen’ dat de letterbode verboden werd – jongenelen [op bladzijde 67] suggereert dat er geen expliciete toestemming zou kunnen zijn geweest voor de druk.