[220] Gibbon probably refers to the "Friends of the People," an association for the reform of the representative system, to which Lord Lauderdale, Grey, Sheridan, Erskine, and twenty-five other members of Parliament belonged.
[221] Berne.
[222] Dumouriez, in April, 1792, despatched three armies to invade Belgium. The column directed against Tournay dispersed, and murdered Dillon, their commander. That which marched against Mons fled as soon as they came in sight of the Austrians near Jemappes.
[223] Name erased.
[224] "Cet audacieux et rusé Harris" is the phrase used by Mirabeau of Lord Malmesbury (Cour de Berlin, Lettre xxxvii., vol. ii. p. 13).
[225] Gibbon's library at Lausanne was bought, in 1796, from Lord Sheffield by Beckford for £950. Beckford shut himself up in it "for six weeks, from early in the morning until night, only now and then taking a ride," and read himself "nearly blind" (Cyrus Redding's "Recollections of the Author of Vathek," New Monthly Magazine, vol. lxxi. p. 307). Growing tired of it, he gave it to Dr. Scholl, a physician at Lausanne. Miss Berry, who visited the library in July, 1803 (Journals and Letters, vol. ii. p. 260), says, "It is, of all the libraries I ever saw, that of which I should most covet the possession—that which seems exactly everything that any gentleman or gentlewoman fond of letters could wish." "Gibbon's library," says Henry Mathews in 1818 (Diary of an Invalid, p. 318), "still remains, but it is buried and lost to the world. It is the property of Mr. Beckford, and lies locked up in an uninhabited house at Lausanne." In 1830 the library was divided into two parts. Half was sold for £500 to an English gentleman; the other half went at the same price to a bookseller at Geneva. The half which was sold to an English purchaser was, in 1876 (Notes and Queries, 5th series, vol. v. p. 425), still kept together in the possession of a Swiss gentleman near Geneva.
[226] John Nichols, F.S.A. (1745-1826), the author of numerous works of great literary and historical value, and from 1778 to 1826 printer, proprietor, and, from 1792, sole manager of the Gentleman's Magazine, to which he constantly contributed.
[227] The letter is published in the Gentleman's Magazine for January, 1794.
[228] The letter referred to in the Gentleman's Magazine is signed "N. S." It gives the Gibbon pedigree from 1596 down to the historian. It no doubt at first attracted Gibbon's attention from the circumstance of its immediately preceding a communication entitled "Strictures on Some Passages in Mr. Gibbon's History." The article in the Gentleman's Magazine was by Sir Egerton Brydges, whose grandmother was a Gibbon, the heiress of Edward Gibbon of West Cliff, and first cousin to the South Sea director who was the historian's grandfather. Gibbon's letter on the subject to Sir Egerton Brydges is quoted by the latter in his Autobiography (vol. i. pp. 225-227).
[229] Probably General Budé, who is mentioned by Madame d'Arblay as holding an appointment about the court at Windsor (Diary and Letters, iii. 40).