For Dr. Brocklesby see ante, pp. 176, 230, 338, 400.

Of Mr. John Nichols, Murphy says that ’his attachment to Dr. Johnson was unwearied.’ Life of Johnson, p. 66.  He was the printer of The Lives of the Poets (ante, p. 36), and the author of Biographical and Literary Anecdotes of William Bowyer, Printer, ’the last of the learned printers,’ whose apprentice he had been (ante, p. 369).  Horace Walpole (Letters, viii. 259) says:—­

’I scarce ever saw a book so correct as Mr. Nichols’s Life of Mr. Bowyer.  I wish it deserved the pains he has bestowed on it every way, and that he would not dub so many men great.  I have known several of his heroes, who were very little men.’

The Life of Bowyer being recast and enlarged was republished under the title of Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century.  From 1778 till his death in 1826 the Gentleman’s Magazine was in great measure in his hands.  Southey, writing in 1804, says:—­

’I have begun to take in here at Keswick the Gentleman’s Magazine, alias the Oldwomania, to enlighten a Portuguese student among the mountains; it does amuse me by its exquisite inanity, and the glorious and intense stupidity of its correspondents; it is, in truth, a disgrace to the age and the country.’  Southey’s Life and Correspondence, ii. 281.

Mr. William Cooke, ‘commonly called Conversation Cooke,’ wrote Lives of Macklin and Foote.  Forster’s Essays, ii. 312, and Gent.  Mag. 1824, p. 374.  Mr. Richard Paul Joddrel, or Jodrell, was the author of The Persian Heroine, a Tragedy, which, in Baker’s Biog.  Dram. i. 400, is wrongly assigned to Sir R.P.  Jodrell, M.D.  Nichols’s Lit.  Anec. ix. 2.

For Mr. Paradise see ante, p. 364, note 2.

Dr. Horsley was the controversialist, later on Bishop of St. David’s and next of Rochester.  Gibbon makes splendid mention of him (Misc.  Works, i. 232) when he tells how ’Dr. Priestley’s Socinian shield has repeatedly been pierced by the mighty spear of Horsley.’  Windham, however, in his Diary in one place (p. 125) speaks of him as having his thoughts ‘intent wholly on prospects of Church preferment;’ and in another place (p. 275) says that ’he often lays down with great confidence what turns out afterwards to be wrong.’  In the House of Lords he once said that ’he did not know what the mass of the people in any country had to do with the laws but to obey them.’ Parl.  Hist. xxxii. 258.  Thurlow rewarded him for his Letters to Priestley by a stall at Gloucester, ’saying that “those who supported the Church should be supported by it."’ Campbell’s Chancellors, ed. 1846, v. 635.

For Mr. Windham, see ante, p. 200.

Hawkins (Life of Johnson, p. 567) thus writes of the formation of the Club:—­