[8] Gibbon's father married his second wife, Miss Dorothea Patton, in 1755.
[9] David Mallet, or Malloch, poet, playwright, and miscellaneous writer (1705-65), is best known for his ballad of William and Margaret, his unsubstantiated claim to the authorship of Rule Britannia, and his edition of Bolingbroke's works. Bolingbroke, said Dr. Johnson, had "spent his life in charging a gun against Christianity," and "left half-a-crown to a hungry Scotchman to draw the trigger." Mallet was "a great declaimer in all the London coffee-houses against Christianity," and the obtrusion of his sceptical views made his household unpleasing to David Hume. To his house Gibbon was taken after his reception into the Church of Rome.
[10] A well-known doctor of the day.
[11] George Simon (1736-1809), Viscount Nuneham, afterwards second Earl of Harcourt, eldest son of the first earl. He was remarkable for his affectation of French manners and fashions.
[12] Word omitted in original.
[13] The Seven Years' War, 1756-63.—"A war," says Horace Walpole, "that reaches from Muscovy to Alsace and from Madras to California" (Horace Walpole to the Earl of Strafford, June 12, 1759).
[14] Dr. John Turton (1736-1806) was in 1782 appointed physician to both the King and Queen. He attended Goldsmith on his death-bed. His progress to fame and fortune was very rapid, and when he died he left his widow £9000 a year in land, and £60,000 in the funds. "The bulk of his great fortune he has bequeathed, after the death of his wife, to her Royal Highness the Princess Mary, their Majesty's fourth daughter" (Annual Register, April 15, 1806).
[15] Miss Porten had now removed from College Street to a large boarding-house which she had built in Dean's Yard, Westminster.
[16] The lottery began to be drawn November 14, 1758; the last ticket was drawn December 12, when "No. 72,570 in the present lottery was drawn a prize of £10,000."
[17] Matthew Maty, born near Utrecht in 1718, settled in England as a physician in 1741; in 1756 he was appointed an under-librarian at the British Museum, and in 1772 succeeded Gowin Knight as chief librarian. His Journal Britannique (1750-55), published in French at the Hague, contains a bi-monthly review of English literature. He died in 1776. If the son, whom Gibbon "tipped," resembled the father, this passage may confirm Dr. Johnson's description of Maty as a "little black dog." For Gibbon's relations with Maty, see note to Letter 15.