[1048] Dr. A. Carlyle (Auto. p. 266) has paid this tribute. ’Lord Elibank,’ he writes, ’had a mind that embraced the greatest variety of topics, and produced the most original remarks. ... He had been a lieutenant-colonel in the army and was at the siege of Carthagena, of which he left an elegant account (which I’m afraid is lost). He was a Jacobite, and a member of the famous Cocoa-tree Club, and resigned his commission on some disgust.’ Dr. Robertson and John Home were his neighbours in the country, ’who made him change or soften down many of his original opinions, and prepared him for becoming a most agreeable member of the Literary Society of Edinburgh.’ Smollett in Humphry Clinker (Letter of July 18), describes him as ’a nobleman whom I have long revered for his humanity and universal intelligence, over and above the entertainment arising from the originality of his character.’ Boswell, in the London Mag. 1779, p. 179, thus mentions the Cocoa-tree Club:—’But even at Court, though I see much external obeisance, I do not find congenial sentiments to warm my heart; and except when I have the conversation of a very few select friends, I am never so well as when I sit down to a dish of coffee in the Cocoa Tree, sacred of old to loyalty, look round me to men of ancient families, and please myself with the consolatory thought that there is perhaps more good in the nation than I know.’
[1049] Johnson’s Works, vii. 380. See ante, i. 81.
[1050] See ante, p. 53.
[1051] The Mitre tavern. Ante, i. 425.
[1052] Of this Earl of Kelly Boswell records the following pun:—’At a dinner at Mr. Crosbie’s, when the company were very merry, the Rev. Dr. Webster told them he was sorry to go away so early, but was obliged to catch the tide, to cross the Firth of Forth. “Better stay a little,” said Thomas Earl of Kelly, “till you be half-seas over."’ Rogers’s Boswelliana, p. 325.
[1053] See ante, i. 354.
[1054] In the first edition, and his son the advocate. Under this son, A. F. Tytler, afterwards a Lord of Session by the title of Lord Woodhouselee, Scott studied history at Edinburgh College. Lockhart’s Scott, ed. 1839, i. 59, 278.
[1055] See ante, i. 396, and ii. 296.
[1056] ’If we know little of the ancient Highlanders, let us not fill the vacuity with Ossian. If we have not searched the Magellanick regions, let us however forbear to people them with Patagons.’ Johnson’s Works, ix. 116. Horace Walpole wrote on May 22, 1766 (Letters, iv. 500):—’Oh! but we have discovered a race of giants! Captain Byron has found a nation of Brobdignags on the coast of Patagonia; the inhabitants on foot taller than he and his men on horseback. I don’t indeed know how he and his sailors came to be riding in the South Seas. However, it is a terrible blow to the Irish, for I suppose all our dowagers now will be for marrying Patagonians.’