Mr. Burke. Edmund Burke (1729-1797), M.P. for Bristol. The dominant theme of Burke’s speech, “the ruin of this declining empire” was a favorite one among anti-ministerial orators, pamphleteers, and poets during the Revolution. Soon after the appearance, in 1781, of the second and third volumes of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Thomas Powys, M.P. for Northamptonshire, read extracts from that work in a debate on a motion for putting an end to the American war. Powys ventured to say that the description of Rome in the Fifth Century by Mr. Gibbon,
whose enrolment in the administration was the only accession of which his Majesty’s ministers had to boast, ... was so strong, so expressive, so applicable, that though it was said to belong to Rome, he could not help thinking that it alluded to a nearer country, and a nearer period (Parliamentary History, XXII, 805).
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the pageantry of domestic warfare. An allusion to the vogue of the militia encampments as places of fashionable resort.
important depredations at—Martha’s Island. Early in September Major-General Grey, under orders from Sir Henry Clinton, invested Martha’s Vineyard and carried off “a considerable and most desirable contribution, consisting of 10,000 sheep, and 300 oxen, for the public service at New York” (The Annual Register for 1779, “History of Europe,” p. 2).
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Mr Dunning. John Dunning (1731-1783), M.P. for Calne; the leading Whig lawyer in the House of Commons; cr. Baron Ashburton of Ashburton, 1782.
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Mr. Sollicitor-General. James Wallace (d. 1783), M.P. for Horsham; succeeded Wedderburn as Solicitor-General, June 1778.