[213] Godfrey Clarke, M.P. for Derbyshire.
[214] The British Coffee-house, in Cockspur Street, was a favourite resort of Scotchmen. The Duke of Bedford, soliciting the votes of the sixteen Scottish peers in 1750, is said to have enclosed all the letters under one cover, and addressed it to the British Coffee-house.
[215] Garrick and Colman were managers of the two rival theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane.
[216] George Colman (1732-1794) was at this time a formidable rival to Garrick. His five-act comedy, The Man of Business, was produced at Covent Garden in January, 1774. It is, as Gibbon describes it, made up from Terence and other writers; "so full of modern lore," writes H. Walpole, "of rencounters, and I know not what, that I scarce comprehended a syllable."
[217] Goldsmith (1728-1774), whose play, She Stoops to Conquer, had been produced at Covent Garden under Colman's management (January, 1773), died April 4, 1774, scarcely more than two months after this dinner. Gibbon signed the Round Robin, drawn up at Sir Joshua Reynolds's by Burke, asking Dr. Johnson to write Goldsmith's epitaph in English instead of Latin.
[218] Probably James Macpherson (1736-1796), whose Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands were published in 1760. At this time he was settled in London, where he was engaged in historical literature, a translation of the Iliad, and political writing on behalf of the Government.
[219] John Home (1722-1808), the author of Douglas (1756), had helped to bring Macpherson's Ossianic poems before the public. His Douglas was played at Covent Garden (1757); his Agis (1758) and Siege of Aquileia (1760) were given at Drury Lane.
[220] Gibbon refers not to the essay on National Characters, but to that on Polygamy and Divorces. Hume quotes a story from Madame d'Aunoy's Mémoires de la Cour d'Espagne. "When the mother of the late King of Spain was on her road towards Madrid, she passed through a little town in Spain famous for its manufactory of gloves and stockings. The magistrates of the place thought they could not better express their joy for the reception of their new queen, than by presenting her with a sample of those commodities for which alone their town was remarkable. The major domo, who conducted the princess, received the gloves very graciously; but, when the stockings were presented, he flung them away with great indignation, and severely reprimanded the magistrates for this egregious piece of indecency. Know, says he, that a queen of Spain has no legs. The young queen, who at that time understood the language but imperfectly, and had often been frightened with stories of Spanish jealousy, imagined that they were to cut off her legs. Upon which she fell a-crying, and begged them to conduct her back to Germany, for that she could never endure the operation; and it was with some difficulty they could appease her" (Hume's Philosophical Works, ed. 1854, vol. iii. p. 205).
[221] Probably a reference to Lancelot Brown (1715-1783), the landscape gardener, known as "Capability Brown."
[222] William Parsons (1746-1817) was appointed Master of the King's Band of Music in 1786, was knighted in 1795, became instructor in music to the princesses in 1796, and acted as a stipendiary police magistrate at Great Marlborough Street.