[14] Hugues Bernard Maret (1763-1839) was not Duc de Bassano in 1807, this title not being conferred upon him until 1809. He was ambassador to England in 1792 and to Naples in 1793. Napoleon made him head of the cabinet and his special confidant. The Bourbons exiled him in 1816.
[15] Denis Diderot (1713-1784), whose Lettre sur les aveugles (1749) introduced him to the world as a philosopher, and whose work on the Encyclopédie is so well known.
[16] "Sir, (a + bn) / n = x, whence God exists; answer!"
[17] This was one James Laurie of Musselburgh.
[18] Jelinger Cookson Symons (1809-1860) was an office-holder with a decided leaning towards the improvement of education and social conditions. He wrote A Plea for Schools (1847), The Industrial Capacities of South Wales (1855), and Lunar Motion (1856), to which last work the critic probably refers.
[19] "Protimalethes" followed this by another work along the same line the following year, The Independence of the Testimony of St. Matthew and St. John tested and vindicated by the theory of chances.
[20] Wilson had already taken up the lance against science in his Strictures on Geology and Astronomy, in reference to a supposed want of harmony between these sciences and some parts of Divine Revelation, Glasgow, 1843. He had also ventured upon poetry in his Pleasures of Piety, Glasgow, 1837.
[21] Mrs. Borron was Elizabeth Willesford Mills before her marriage. She made an attempt at literature in her Sibyl's Leaves, London (printed at Devonport), 1826.
[22] See Vol. I, page 386, note 10 {801}.
[23] See Vol. I, page 43, notes 7 {32} and 8 {33}.