Note 5 — 4.

It is probable that this was the Mr. Taaffe who, with Mr. Wortley Montagu and Lord Southwell, invited a Jew named Abraham Payba to dine with them at Montagu's lodgings in Paris, in September, 1751. Having made him drunk, they won from him in less than an hour eight hundred louis d'or. Their debtor paid them with drafts which he knew would be dishonoured. Finding themselves outwitted, Taaffe and Montagu broke into Payba's house, and possessed themselves of a considerable sum of money and a quantity of jewellery. For this offence they were imprisoned for three months in the Grand Châtelet (Nichols' Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, vol. iv. pp. 629-634).