David Hume

She said she designed this genre as a new one: she planned to interlace her material about the manners of the age, the state of literature, arts, &c. with as slender a thread of political...

In 1933 there was excitement in the book-collecting world when a small collection of books that Austen had owned (by writers like Ariosto , Goldsmith , Hume , and Thomson ) appeared in the catalogue...

During the five years of their engagement, John Austin decided that Sarah was in need of a rigorous intellectual education in accordance with his religious, political, and philosophical bent of mind. He provided her...

This novel is heavy-handedly moralistic. The heroine, Miriam Harcott, is the child of an atheistical philosopher (converted in the end by a good—not Methodist—clergyman) and a careless mother who causes the deaths of three of...

Brooke's advertisement to volume 3 says she gave up her plan for an essay on the writing of history, and settled instead on using notes to demonstrate how this work is, as all history ought...

MC 's brother, another James Steuart , was educated at school and university and on the Grand Tour. He married Lady Frances Wemyss in 1743, and two years later, because she was ill with smallpox...

DC 's birth family had accustomed her to moving in literary, political, and theatrical circles, and her friends included Mary Lady Hervey , David Hume , David Garrick , and Edward Gibbon . Her father...

The first letter is entitled On the Principles of Religion; HMC assures her niece that she is one of your warmest friends. She cautions about choice of friends and even more about choice of...

She belonged to the established Church of Scotland (that is, Presbyterian). She was not, however, an orthodox Calvinist; she had enough belief to combat the atheism of her friend David Hume , but not such...

She wrote that some of my most steady friends thro' Life were my childhood companions, girls she had been at school with. Besides Ramsay (whom, too, she had known since her girlhood), Burns

Her friendship with Hume was one of ease and intimacy. She joked with him and teased him, tried earnestly to convert him from atheism to Christianity, urged him to visit France and to bring Rousseau

Her letters present a vivid account of Edinburgh life in the later eighteenth century, and go into detail on more personal topics like the way she used physical exertion to counter gloom and melancholy. Many...

Her father, Henry Seymour Conway , was an army officer who rose to be Field-Marshal. His distinguished military career was matched by his services to Whig politics. His literary interests made him a friend of...

AD 's mastery of Latin and her respectable knowledge of Greek were self-acquired, though Horace Walpole had a hand in her education. She studied sculpture from childhood, being taught by Giuseppe Ceracchi , John Bacon

AD 's wide circle of friends included Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire , Lady Melbourne , Joanna Baillie , Sarah Siddons , the Berrysisters , the dramatist Lady Elizabeth Craven (formerly Berkeley, later Margravine of Anspach)