Gibbon, after describing how he used to attend Voltaire's private theatre at Monrepos in 1757 and 1758, continues:—
'The habits of pleasure fortified my taste for the French theatre, and that taste has perhaps abated my idolatry for the gigantic genius of Shakespeare, which is inculcated from our infancy as the first duty of an Englishman.' —Memoirs of Edward Gibbon, ed. 1837, i. 90.
Archibald Campbell.
(Vol. v, p. 357.)
Mr. C. E. Doble informs me that in the Bodleian Library 'there is a characteristic letter of Archibald Campbell in a Life of Francis Lee in Rawlinson, J., 4to. 2. 197; and also a skeleton life of him in Rawlinson, J., 4to. 5. 301.'
Cocoa Tree Club.
(Vol. v, p. 386, n. 1.)
Gibbon records in his Journal on November 24, 1762, a visit to the Cocoa
Tree Club:—
'That respectable body, of which I have the honour of being a member, affords every evening a sight truly English. Twenty or thirty, perhaps, of the first men in the kingdom in point of fashion and fortune, supping at little tables covered with a napkin, in the middle of a coffee-room, upon a bit of cold meat or a sandwich, and drinking a glass of punch. At present we are full of king's counsellors and lords of the bed-chamber, who, having jumped into the ministry, make a very singular medley of their old principles and language with their modern ones.' —Memoirs of Edward Gibbon, ed. 1827, i. 131.
Johnson's use of the word 'big'.