giving house-room to many unfortunates, though he did not object to dining out.
He had a deep Christian faith. He told an Anglican priest that as an old man he stood
bareheaded in the rain for a considerable time in Uttoxeter Market, because as a
young man he had refused his father’s request to look after the family’s bookstall
there: ‘In contrition I stood, and I hope the penance was expiatory.’212 6 · AUGUSTAN LITERATURE: TO 1790
Non-fictional prose: 1710–98
1710 Bishop Berkeley, Treatise on the Principles of Human Knowledge
1739 David Hume, Treatise on HumanNature (3 vols, 1740)
1750 Samuel Johnson (ed.), The Rambler(to 1752)
1751 (Diderot and D’Alembert, French Encyclopaedia, volume 1; 35 volumes, 1780)
1754 Hume, History of England(2 vols, 1762)
1755 Johnson, Dictionary of the English Language
1756 Edmund Burke, Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful
1757 Tobias Smollett, A Complete History of England(4 volumes, 1758)
1758 Edward Gibbon, Essai sur l’étude de la littérature; Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human
Understanding
1759 Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments
1762 Bishop Hurd, Letters of Chivalry and Romance; Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism
1763 Lady Mary Montagu (d.1762), Letters
1765 Johnson, Preface to Shakespeare; Henry Fuseli, Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks
(trans. of Winckelmann)
1769 Elizabeth Montagu, An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Shakespeare; Sir Joshua
Reynolds, Discourses on Art
1770 Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents
1771 John Wesley, Collected Prose Works(32 vols, 1774)
1773 James Cook, Voyage Round the World
1774 Lord Chesterfield (d.1773), Letters to His Natural Son; Thomas Warton, History of English
Poetry (3 vols, 1781)
1775 Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
1776 Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire(6 vols, 1788); Smith, The Wealth of
Nations; Thomas Paine, Common Sense
1779 Hume (d.1776), Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion; Johnson, The Works of the
English Poets, with Prefaces, Biographical and Critical(68 vols, 1781)
1783 Hugh Blair, Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres
1785 James Boswell, A Tour of the Hebrides; Horace Walpole, An Essay on Modern
Gardening
1789 Charles Burney, A General History of Music(4 vols); Gilbert White, Natural History of
Selborne
1790 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France; Thomas Bewick, General History of
Quadrupeds
1791 Boswell, The Life of Johnson; William Gilpin, Essays on Picturesque Beauty; Paine, The
Rights of Man
1792 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
1793 William Godwin, Political Justice
1794 Paine, The Age of Reason(3 vols, 1811)
1796 Burke, A Letter to a Noble Lord
1798 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Collected Speeches