subjects. The acquaintance then formed never knew any interruption.[1] It was not, however, till after the death of Lady Shelburne that Dr. Price became a regular habitué of Shelburne House and Bowood. He was then forty-eight years of age, having been born in 1723 at Tynton in Glamorganshire, where his father had been minister of a congregation of Protestant Dissenters, originally formed by one of the clergymen ejected after the passing of the Act of Uniformity of Charles II., and he was himself the minister of the Unitarian congregations of Newington Green and Poor Jewry Lane. It was not, however, till his fame as an author was established that Dr. Price obtained any celebrity as a preacher, nature having denied him most of the physical qualities necessary to success in the pulpit. In 1758 he published a Controversial Treatise on the Foundation of Morals, the courtesy of the tone of which so attracted Hume, that he at once sought the acquaintance of the author. In 1767 the three Dissertations already mentioned appeared. In the last of these he applied the words "poor sophistry" to the arguments of Hume against the credibility of miracles, but immediately after, regretting the use of the expression, wrote to the philosopher promising to withdraw it in the next edition. Hume wrote a courteous reply and expressed "his wonder at such scrupulousness on the part of a clergyman."[2]
Hitherto the publications of Dr. Price had been almost entirely of a theological or metaphysical character. A deep religious feeling almost amounting to morbid sentiment, long led him to look upon all other forms of literary activity as so many temptations which it was his duty to guard against, and it was only gradually that, emancipating himself from these prejudices, he entered on the inquiries
- ↑ Rutt's Life of Priestley, i. 175. See also Gentleman's Magazine for 1783, Part II. Origin of Lord Shelburne's connection with the Dissenters, p. 22; and answer by Mr. Toulmin, p. 103.
- ↑ The above details are gathered from Memoirs of Dr. Price, by William Morgan. The statement there made that Lord Shelburne first sought the acquaintance of Dr. Price to obtain spiritual consolation after the death of his wife, may be disproved by reference to the dates of the two events. Lady Shelburne died in 1771; the first interview with Dr. Price was in 1769.
