[Our Will.] ‘Mr. William Burke, late Secretary to General Conway, and member for Bedwin, Wiltshire’ (Note to second edition). He was a kinsman of Edmund Burke, and one of the supposed authors of Junius’s Letters. He died in 1798. ‘It is said that the notices Goldsmith first wrote of the Burkes were so severe that Hugh Boyd persuaded the poet to alter them, and entirely rewrite the character of William, for he was sure that if the Burkes saw what was originally written of them the peace of the Club would be disturbed.’ (Rev. W. Hunt in Dict. Nat. Biography, Art. ‘William Burke.’)
[And Dick.] Richard Burke, Edmund Burke’s younger brother. He was for some years Collector to the Customs at Grenada, being on a visit to London when Retaliation was written (Forster’s Life, 1871, ii. 404). He died in 1794, Recorder of Bristol.
[Our Cumberland’s sweetbread.] Richard Cumberland, the poet, novelist, and dramatist, 1731–1811, author of The West Indian, 1771, The Fashionable Lover, 1772, and many other more or less sentimental plays. In his Memoirs, 1807, i. 369–71, he gives an account of the origin of Retaliation, which adds a few dubious particulars to that of Garrick. But it was written from memory long after the events it records.
[Douglas.] ‘Dr. Douglas, since Bishop of Salisbury,’ says Cumberland. He died in 1807 (v. infra).
[Ridge.] ‘Counsellor John Ridge, a gentleman belonging to the Irish Bar’ (Note to second edition). ‘Burke,’ says Bolton Corney, ‘in 1771, described him as “one of the honestest and best-natured men living, and inferior to none of his profession in ability.”’ (See also note to line 125.)
[Hickey.] The commentator of the second edition of Retaliation calls this gentleman ‘honest Tom Hickey’. His Christian name, however, was Joseph (Letter of Burke, November 8, 1774). He was a jovial, good-natured, over-blunt Irishman, the legal adviser of both Burke and Reynolds. Indeed it was Hickey who drew the conveyance of the land on which Reynolds’s house ‘next to the Star and Garter’ at Richmond (Wick House) was built by Chambers the architect. Hickey died in 1794. Reynolds painted his portrait for Burke, and it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1772 (No. 208). In 1833 it belonged to Mr. T. H. Burke. Sir Joshua also painted Miss Hickey in 1769–73. Her father, not much to Goldsmith’s satisfaction, was one of the Paris party in 1770. See also note to l. 125.
[Magnanimous Goldsmith.] According to Malone (Reynolds’s Works, second edition, 1801, i. xc), Goldsmith intended to have concluded with his own character.
[Tommy Townshend,] M.P. for Whitchurch, Hampshire, afterwards first Viscount Sydney. He died in 1800. Junius says Bolton Corney, gives a portrait of him as still life. His presence in Retaliation is accounted for by the fact that he had commented in Parliament upon Johnson’s pension. ‘I am well assured,’ says Boswell, ‘that Mr. Townshend’s attack upon Johnson was the occasion of his “hitching in a rhyme”; for, that in the original copy of Goldsmith’s character of Mr. Burke, in his Retaliation another person’s name stood in the couplet where Mr. Townshend is now introduced.’ (Birkbeck Hill’s Boswell, 1887, iv. 318.)
[too deep for his hearers.] ‘The emotion to which he commonly appealed was that too rare one, the love of wisdom, and he combined his thoughts and knowledge in propositions of wisdom so weighty and strong, that the minds of ordinary hearers were not on the instant prepared for them.’ (Morley’s Burke, 1882, 209–10.)
[And thought of convincing, while they thought of dining.] For the reason given in the previous note, many of Burke’s hearers often took the opportunity of his rising to speak, to retire to dinner. Thus he acquired the nickname of the ‘Dinner Bell.’