[[1]] See DNB.
[[2]] For the information about Courtenay's election, I am indebted to Professor James M. Osborn of Yale University. Boswell gives no precise date for Courtenay's entry into the Club. His first reference to Courtenay's membership occurs in his journal entry of 19 January 1790. See Private Papers of James Boswell, ed. Geoffrey Scott and Frederick A. Pottle (Privately Printed, 1928-1934), XVIII, 22. See also Boswell's letter to Edmond Malone dated 16 December 1790, Letters of James Boswell, ed. C. B. Tinker (Oxford, 1924), II, 409-410. Courtenay and other intimates of Boswell were called "The Gang" by Philip Metcalfe. See Private Papers, XVII, 52, 55; XVIII, 15.
[[3]] Private Papers, XVI, 106.
[[4]] Ibid., XVII, 80. For additional testimony to Courtenay's reputation as a wit, see Thraliana, ed. Katharine C. Balderston (Oxford, 1951), I, 486, and James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone (London, 1860), 287-288.
[[5]] Private Papers, XVII, 86.
[[6]] Ibid., pp. 76-77.
[[7]] Ibid., XVI, 178. "M. C." is Mrs. Rudd.
[[8]] See Boswell's letters to Malone, Letters, II, 405, 427, and Private Papers, XVIII, 100. Courtenay became alarmed over Boswell's deepening melancholy, as seen in this passage from his letter to Malone of 22 February 1791: "Poor Boswell is very low, & desperate & ... melancholy mad, feels no spring, no pleasure in existence, & is so perceptibly altered for the worse that it is remarked everywhere. I try all I can to revivify him, but he [turns?] so tiresomely & tediously—for the same cursed trite commonplace topics, about death &c.—that we grow old, and when we are old, we are not young—that I despair of effecting a cure. Doctors Warren and Devaynes very kindly interest themselves about him, but you wd be of more service to him than anyone." Quoted from a MS at Yale University Library by James Osborn, "Edmond Malone and Dr. Johnson," Johnson, Boswell and Their Circle: Essays Presented to Lawrence Fitzroy Powell in Honour of His Eighty-fourth Birthday (Oxford, 1965), p. 16.
[[9]] Letters, II, 428, 425. Boswell tried to negotiate loans for Courtenay, and made a successful application to Reynolds. See Private Papers, XVII, 85-86, 101-102; XVIII, 120.
[[10]] Private Papers, XVIII, 171, 178, 184.