Usage of semicolons in Hume's "Enquiry concerning human understanding"

Question

Were there no advantage to be reaped from these studies, beyond the gratification of an innocent curiosity, yet ought not even this to be despised; as being one accession to those few safe and harmless pleasures, which are bestowed on human race.

As far, as I know, there are two ways of using semicolon:

1. To mark the end of the list of items.
2. To separate two clauses in the same sentence.

I don't see here either the list of items, or the full value clause after semicolon (there should be a verb phrase before 'which' in "as being one accession to those few safe and harmless pleasures, which are bestowed on human race" to consider this clause a full value one, no?).

It seems to me that in the sentence in the whole "as being one accession to those few safe and harmless pleasures, which are bestowed on human race" is a dependant clause. And in this dependant clause, there are its own main and dependant clauses too. The main one goes before 'which'. And, as I said, there's no verbal phrase in it (but it should be there to justify the use of semicolon).

"as being..." is also referring to the noun phrase before semicolon (that also seems kinda strange).

I'm not a native, I described my perception of this sentence. Can you explain me where I'm wrong?

Answer 1

In Hume's era, the semicolon could indicate a longer pause or break up the sentence without needing to separate two independent clauses.

In a short essay by Cynthia Wall, "'The Little Words': The Close Reading of Really Small Things" (The Wordsworth Circle, Volume 47, No. 2/3, 2016, p. 114-118), she uses a couple of sources to summarize the state of the semicolon in the 18th century:

Historically, punctuation could perform as rhetorical/aural markers and/or grammatical/visual ones. Thomas Dyche, for example -- in the tradition of Isaac Watts and the elocutionist Thomas Sheridan -- notes the musical and rhythmic undercurrents of the various stops: "Stops, consider'd as Intervals in Reading, are but Four, viz., Comma, Semicolon, Colon, and Period, or full Stop: And these bear a kind of Musical Proportion of Time one to another: For a Comma stops the Reader's Voice, while he may privately, with Deliberation tell One; the Semicolon, Two; the Colon, Three; and the Period, Four" (105). Anne Fisher, on the other hand, says that "A Semicolon (;) is made Use of when Half of the Sentence is left behind" (42).

In other words, among these 18th century witnesses, they considered the semicolon as either a measure of pause or as based on proportion between the start and the end of the sentence.

One additional possibility is that the semicolon replaces a comma before what scholar Vivian Salmon ("Early Seventeenth-Century Punctuation as a Guide to Sentence Structure," The Review of English Studies, Vol. 13, No. 52, 1962, pp. 347-360) calls an adverbial clause, such as one headed by as:

A third fairly common use of the semicolon within the sentence cannot be simply explained as grammatical. It sometimes replaces the comma before an adverbial clause, and seems to indicate that the clause is an afterthought:

Pet., f., 5r: much lesse given iudgment vpon myne answer; thoughe it hath bene called for

OL, f., B2v: God ... hath diligently obserued ... the lines of euery of his workes; because he vsed to commende the perfection of them

Its nearest equivalent in modern English seems to be the dash, and it is difficult to know whether it has semantic value, indicating something added to a sentence which was thought to be completed, or rhetorical value, indicating pause, in speech.

These explanations need not be mutually exclusive. It could both indicate a longer pause and introduce an afterthought to the sentence.