[158] By the cabinets of St. Petersburg and Berlin Stanislas Poniatowski was presented to the Poles as their king in 1764: owing to the partition of his dominions he died broken-hearted at St. Petersburg in 1798.
[159] Alexander, tenth Earl of Eglinton, died in 1769, and was succeeded by his brother, Colonel Archibald Montgomery.
[160] John Turberville Needham, a priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and an eminent physiologist, was born 1713 and died 1781. He received honours from many of the learned societies, and was sometime director of the Academy of Sciences at Brussels. In botanical science his name is perpetuated in the genus needhamia.
[161] The Hon. Captain Andrew Erskine.
[162] Sir Joseph Yorke was third son of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke. After serving in the army till he attained the rank of general, he was appointed ambassador at the Hague, where he remained thirty years. In 1788 he was created Baron Dover. He died on the 2nd December, 1792.
[163] Andrew Stuart was counsel on the Hamilton side of the Douglas case, and fought a duel with Edward, afterwards Lord Thurlow, the leading counsel for Mr. Archibald Douglas. He published, in 1773, “Letters to Lord Mansfield,” on the Douglas case, which, as models of polished invective, have been compared with the Letters of Junius. In 1798 he issued a “Genealogical History of the Stewarts.”
[164] William Nairne, son of Sir William Nairne, Bart., of Dunsinnan, was admitted advocate in 1755. He was in 1758 appointed conjunct commissary-clerk of Edinburgh, and in 1786 was raised to the bench, when he assumed the judicial title of Lord Dunsinnan. He died in March, 1811.
[165] A zealous patriot, deeply imbued with republican notions, Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun opposed the arbitrary measures of the House of Stuart, and after the revolution proved, from his irritable temper, a considerable incubus on the Government of William III. He violently opposed the union, and subsequently to that event retired from public affairs. He died at London in 1716, aged sixty-three.
[166] The celebrated Bishop Berkeley, who maintained the non-existence of matter as one of his philosophical opinions.
[167] The Hon. Peregrine Bertie, third son of Willoughby, third Earl of Abingdon, was born in 1741. He became a captain in the Royal Navy, and was sometime M.P. for Oxford. He died in 1790.