Hume, without positively asserting more than he can prove, gives prominence to all the circumstances which can support his case. He glides lightly over those which are unfavourable to it. His own witnesses are applauded and encouraged; the statements which seem to throw discredit on them are controverted; the contradictions into which they fall are explained away; a clear and connected abstract of their evidence is given. Every thing that is offered on the other side is scrutinized with the utmost severity; every suspicious circumstance is a ground for comment and invective; what cannot be denied is extenuated, or passed by without notice. Concessions even are sometimes made; but this insidious candour only increases the effect of this vast mass of sophistry.[405:1] Yet when there was any thing of a grand and solemn character in the proceedings of the Republican party,--when they were not connected with the rude guards, and their insults to the fallen majesty of England; with the long psalms, long sermons, and long faces of the Puritans; with Trouble-world Lilburne, Praise-God Barebones, or eccentric, stubborn, impracticable William Prynne,--he could employ the easy majesty of his language in surrounding them with a suiting dignity of tone; and he did so with apparent pleasure. Witness his description of the meeting of the Long Parliament, and of the preparations for the king's trial before the High Court of Justice. He seems to have felt, not unfrequently, the inconsistencies that must be perceptible between the tone of his historical, and the political doctrines of his philosophical works; and his attempts to reconcile them with each other, sometimes only serve to make the difference more conspicuous. Speaking of the act of holding judgment on Charles I., he says, "If ever, on any occasion, it were laudable to conceal truth from the populace, it must be confessed that the doctrine of resistance affords such an example; and that all speculative reasoners ought to observe, with regard to this principle, the same cautious silence which the laws, in every species of government, have ever prescribed to themselves." One could imagine a congress of crowned heads, or a conclave of cardinals, adopting such a view; and resolving, at the same moment, that it should be kept as secret as the grave. But that a man should speak of the right of resistance as existing, and say the knowledge of it ought not to be promulgated, and print and publish this in a book in his own vernacular language, is surely as remarkable an anomaly, as the history of practical contradictions can exhibit. Owing to his opinion of the manner in which the Abbé Le Blanc had rendered his "Political Discourses" into French, he expressed a wish, in the following courteous letter, that the History should have the benefit of being translated by the same hand. HUME _to the_ ABBÉ LE BLANC.