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Note to the Revised Edition

THIS volume has been revised throughout for this new printing. First, the text of Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary has been rechecked carefully, using photocopies supplied by the Huntington Library of both the 1772 edition and the 1777 edition. A fair number of corrections have been made in the text, but rarely do these affect Hume’s meaning. The 1777 edition continues to serve as the copy-text, but a comparison with the 1772 edition was helpful in detecting typographical errors in the 1777 edition that might otherwise be indistinguishable. In their compilation of variant readings, Green and Grose overlooked the 1772 edition of Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary, which appeared as the first volume of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (A New Edition; London: Printed for T. Cadell, in the Strand: and A. Kincaid, and A. Donaldson, at Edinburgh; two volumes). A comparison of the 1777 edition of Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary with that of 1772 shows that Hume reworked carefully the last edition that he prepared for the press, sometimes making substantial changes.

Second, I have corrected the other writings reprinted in this volume against the appropriate copy-texts, thus ending all dependence on the unreliable edition of Green and Grose, save for the use of their apparatus of variant readings. I am grateful to the British Library for supplying photocopies of the 1777 edition of Hume’s “Life” and Smith’s “Letter” and to the Houghton Library of Harvard University for photocopies of the essays withdrawn by Hume, in their final printings.

Third, I have redesigned and corrected the Index of the first edition. Finally, I have made a few minor changes in the editorial apparatus. I am indebted to the following persons for suggestions that were helpful in preparing this revised edition: John Danford of the University of Houston; Thomas Pangle of the University of Toronto; Samuel Shaffer of Nashville, Tennessee; and M. A. Stewart of the University of Lancaster.

E.F.M.

October 1986