John Hill Burton

John Hill Burton FRSE (22 August 1809 – 10 August 1881) was a Scottish advocate, historian and economist. The author of Life and Correspondence of David Hume, he was secretary of the Scottish Prison Board (1854–77), and Historiographer Royal (1867–1881).

A bust of John Hill Burton as portrayed on his wife's grave in Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh (carved by William Brodie in 1881)

Quotes

• To every man of our Saxon race endowed with full health and strength, there is committed, as if it were the price he pays for these blessings, the custody of a restless demon, for which he is doomed to find ceaseless excitement, either in honest work, or some less profitable or more mischievous occupation. Countless have been the projects devised by the wit of man to open up for this fiend fields of exertion great enough for the absorption of its tireless energies, and none of them is more hopeful than the great world of books, if the demon is docile enough to be coaxed into it. Then will its erratic restlessness be sobered by the immensity of the sphere of exertion, and the consciousness that, however vehemently and however long it may struggle, the resources set before it will not be exhausted when the life to which it is attached shall have faded away ; and hence, instead of dreading the languor of inaction, it will have to summon all its resources of promptness and activity to get over any considerable portion of the ground within the short space allotted to the life of man.
  • The Book-Hunter (1862), p. 106; quoted as an epigraph by Pisanus Fraxi, Centuria Librorum Absconditorum (1879), p. vi