removing, is much
more questionable. To magnify any branch of human knowledge beyond its
just importance may, indeed, tend to weaken the force of religious
faith; but many acute metaphysicans have been good Christians; and
before the question thus agitated can be set at rest, we must suppose a
certain proficiency in those inquiries which he would proscribe as
dangerous. After all, we can discover no more reason why sciolists in
metaphysics should bring that study into discredit, than that religion
itself should be disparaged through the extravagance of fanaticism. To
have met the subject fully, he ought to have shewn that not only those
opinions which he controverts are erroneous, but that all the systems of
former metaphysicians were so likewise.

The Essay on Truth, in which he endeavoured to establish his own
hypothesis, being finished in 1769, he employed Sir William Forbes and
Mr. Arbuthnot to negotiate its sale with the booksellers. They, however,
refused to purchase it on any terms; and the work would have remained
unpublished, if his two friends, making use of a little pious fraud, had
not informed him that the manuscript was sold for fifty guineas, a sum
which they at the same time remitted him, and that they had stipulated
with the booksellers to be partakers in the profits. The book
accordingly appeared in the following year; and having gained many
admirers, was quickly followed by a second impression, which he revised
and corrected with much pains.

In the autumn of 1771, he again visited London, where the reputation
obtained by the Essay and by the first book of the Minstrel, then
recently published, opened for him an introduction into the circles most
respectable for rank and literature. Lord Lyttelton declared that it
seemed to him his once most beloved minstrel, Thomson, was come down
from Heaven refined by the converse of purer spirits than those he lived
with here, to let him hear him sing again the beauties of nature and the
finest feelings of virtue, not with human, but with angelic strains. He
added his wishes that it were in his power to do Beattie any service.
From Mrs. Montagu he on different occasions received more substantial
tokens of regard.

Except the trifling emolument derived from his writings, he had hitherto
been supported merely by the small income appended to his professorship.
But the Earl of Dartmouth, a nobleman to whom nothing that concerned the
interests of religion was indif