Note 1048 — WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 10.

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.'