David Hume, "liberal historian"

Philosophical historian was a tag commonly attached to David Hume during his lifetime, but it appears that he had acquired the label liberal historian, a term to be associated later with such overtly Whig writers as Lords Acton and Macaulay, within a few decades of his death. William Hayley in his "Life of Milton" complained that historians had dealt unfairly with the poet's friend and patron, John Bradshaw. Hume is without doubt, Knox-Shaw thinks, the liberal historian whom Hayley has principally in view in his criticism.