North Briton Research Articles

Transcribing Voices, Fashioning a Genre: Orality, Hybridity, and Inventiveness in James Oswald’s Songs from Ossian

A volume of songs with tunes, The Pocket Companion for the Guittar (n.d.), issued in London by the Scottish composer and music publisher James Oswald, contains nine songs from the poems of Ossian that were purportedly taken down from the singing of James Macpherson, their originator. This essay examines the origin and background of these songs from a cultural and political perspective, posing the questions as to when and why they were conceived, allegedly transcribed from the singing of the author, and inserted into a volume of mainly instrumental tunes, and their texts, by recognized masters such as Handel and Pergolesi. The date of inclusion must have been after the appearance of Temora (1763), the third and final volume of Macpherson’s Ossian poems, since several of the song texts are taken from that work. But the instrumental volume itself, the sixth in a series issued by Oswald, may already have been in preparation and Oswald probably wanted to take advantage of Macpherson’s latest bestseller. The central argument of this article is that these songs are a unique hybrid, reflective of the status of their makers in a London often suspicious of inventive “North Britons” like Macpherson and Oswald.

Aggravation in Tort Before 1763

ABSTRACT According to a well-settled narrative, modern exemplary (or punitive) damages were first awarded in 1763 in two famous tort cases that arose from the publication of the controversial forty-fifth issue of the North Briton newspaper. Before these cases were decided, English juries only ever increased damages in aggravated tort cases to further compensate plaintiffs for various intangible injuries. This article presents a challenge to this narrative. It seeks to do so by systematically accounting for the place of ‘aggravation’ in the practice of litigating tort actions from the turn of the seventeenth century to the North Briton decisions. It shows that remedial judgments about how to respond to matters of aggravation in tort were fundamentally conceived as belonging to the jury’s adjudicative province, and in which judges increasingly hesitated to interfere. Ultimately, this article contends there is sufficient evidence upon which to conclude that – within this province – pre-1763 juries increased the financial liability of aggravated tortfeasors according to diverse principles, not all of which purported to repair the full extent of a plaintiff’s suffering. In select cases, juries may have applied punitive and exemplary principles.

Scotland, Britain, Europe: Parallels with Eighteenth-century Political Debate

This article focuses on the controversial eighteenth-century Whig politician, John Wilkes (1725–97), his journalism and his reception in the Scottish periodical press, while considering parallels with current debates on Brexit and Scottish independence. Wilkes, seen by some at the time as a notorious rabble-rouser and a voracious Scotophobe, was nevertheless elected democratically (an unusual phenomenon at this time) to various political offices while campaigning for the freedom of the press. His outspoken attacks on the Scottish Prime Minister, Lord Bute, and associated insults to Scotland, prompted an angry response in the Scottish press and magnified the political divide between Scotland and England. If Wilkes represented ‘liberty’ to many English Whigs, he symbolised outspoken prejudice to many in Scotland. The article will examine some of Wilkes's own pronouncements on the Scots in his North Briton magazine, alongside responses in the contemporary Scottish periodical press. The debates that Wilkes focuses on – Scotland's so-called ‘rebellious’ nature and its unhelpful attachment to continental Europe – resonate with twenty-first-century political debates in illuminating ways.

The Early Welsh Cult of Arthur: Some Points at Issue

Abstract A recent discussion of Arthur and Wales prompts a reply, using up-to-date research. It offers these surprising conclusions. Arthur really existed: he is not a myth or a legend, but historical. He will not have been Welsh, but a North Briton, and perhaps a Strathclyder. His battles, fought against other Britons and not the English, can all be located in southern Scotland and the Borders. Camlan, where Arthur fell, can be securely dated to 537 (after the Welsh annals) and situated north of Carlisle on Hadrian’s Wall (as proposed in 1935 by O. S. G. Crawford). The battle of Mount Badon in 493 will, however, have nothing to do with Arthur or North Britain. It was a British victory over the English, fought near Swindon and perhaps at the hillfort of Ringsbury overlooking Braydon Forest. Proponents of a Northern Arthur, like Rachel Bromwich (1915-2010) and Charles Thomas (1928-2016) can thus be vindicated against those rejecting a Northern Arthur, like Professor Kenneth Jackson (1909-91) of Edinburgh.

Cosmo Innes and the Defence of the Scotland’s Past, c. 1825–1875 by Richard A. Marsden (review)

Reviewed by: Cosmo Innes and the Defence of the Scotland’s Past, c. 1825–1875 by Richard A. Marsden Peter C. Grosvenor (bio) Richard A. Marsden, Cosmo Innes and the Defence of the Scotland’s Past, c. 1825–1875 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. xi + 365. $144.95/£80. Scotland commanded the world’s attention during the country’s independence referendum in September 2014. Despite the 55 percent to 45 percent rejection of independence, it has retained that attention with the Scottish National Party’s sweep of 56 out of 59 Westminster parliamentary seats in the May 2015 UK general election. [End Page 433] Yet political nationalism of the separatist variety is a recent phenomenon in Scottish history, with no concerted and sustained challenge to the Anglocentric Union until the 1930s and no significant political breakthrough until the late 1960s. There has been a major scholarly effort to explain the relative historical lateness of Scottish nationalism’s emergence. Much of that effort has been concentrated on the historiography of Scotland in the mid-nineteenth century, a time when political nationalisms were ascendant elsewhere in Europe, as manifested in the revolutions of 1848. The established view within this scholarship is that Scotland failed to continue Sir Walter Scott’s project of countering the anglicizing forces of the Enlightenment by asserting Scottish distinctiveness within the context of the Union. This is held to be particularly evident in absence of a robust and distinctively Scottish national history, as is argued in Marinell Ash’s seminal text The Strange Death of Scottish History (1980). Dr. Richard A. Marsden, who teaches in the School of History, Archaeology, and Religion at Cardiff University, has entered this historiographical dispute with a meticulous study of Scottish antiquary Cosmo Innes (1798–1874). An advocate and judge by profession, Innes was a prolific editor of Scottish historical documents, with an emphasis on the medieval period, whose work earned considerable respect in both Scotland and England. Marsden’s study places Innes “at the forefront of a small group of antiquaries and historians who sought to make their fellow Scots more aware of and thus more appreciative of their own history” (297). The ideological framework provided by the Enlightenment produced a Scottish historical scholarship in which Scotland’s history was presented as a story of progress from the inferior and more primitive conditions of the past to the celebrated achievements of the present. The past, in other words, was something from which to escape. In particular, the pre-Reformation period was denigrated for a backwardness that was explained in terms of the constraints of Catholicism. Marsden demonstrates that Innes, whose political sympathies lay with the Whigs in politics, worked within this Enlightenment framework. At the same time, he was influenced by the early nineteenth-century resurgence of interest in Scottish distinctiveness and by a resistance to assimilation into English culture. By mid-century, these trends were manifesting themselves in the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, which in turn prefigured the campaign for a Secretary of State for Scotland in the 1870s and, ultimately, the movement for Home Rule within the United Kingdom in the 1880s. While accepting the essential Englishness of the British Constitution, Innes set about establishing the Scots as something more than North Britons. His philosophy of history acknowledged historical specificity: the recognition that different peoples had different needs at different points in the past. Consequently, past institutions and practices were to be presented [End Page 434] not as historical blind alleys but as crucial and indispensible steps towards Scotland’s modernity. In this way, Innes attempted to reconcile progressivist and romanticist historical scholarship. This text is a valuable addition to the study of nineteenth-century Scottish historiography and adds to our understanding of the character of Scottish national awareness and political nationalism. Marsden supplies chapters which examine in detail Innes’s work on Acts of the Scottish Parliament, burgh sources, ecclesiastical cartularies, university records, family papers, manuscript facsimiles, illustrations, and photography. The appendix of “Innes’s Periodical Contributions” will be of particular interest to readers of VPR. Innes was a frequent contributor to periodicals during the 1850s and 1860s. The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals attributes to...

NORTHUMBRIA AND THE FAMILY OF RHUN

Amongst the scraps of information about North Britons in the ninth-century Historia Brittonum are these. We hear that the first wife of Oswiu (d. 670), King of Bernicia from 643 and Deira from 651,...

Arthur Murphy and Florida Peat: The Gray’s Inn Journal and versions of the apolitical

In the introduction to this completed 'Works' (1786), Arthur Murphy (1727-1805) wrote: ‘Of the political papers which fell from my pen many years ago, I hope no trace is left’. Although Murphy’s career as a political propagandist in the late 1750s and early 1760s was relatively brief, the controversies which he both provoked and reacted to in the anti-Pitt 'The Test' (1756-1757) and the pro-ministerial The Auditor (1763-1763) dogged his literary career long after his resignation as the self-proclaimed ‘auditor’ of public opinion. Reading across a range of Murphy’s dramatic works and early political and popular journalism, we argue that Murphy’s negative view of popular political participation is intriguing for the way in which it exemplifies a fascinating mid-century political paradox. Although Murphy wished to restrict political participation, the mid-century expansion of political discussion that bolstered the opponent essay-sheet 'The North Briton' (1762-1763) forced him to engage an even larger readership, thus undermining his entire political philosophy. Focusing on the Florida Peat controversy, which disgraced Murphy as a political commentator, this article argues that the author’s studied and self-contradictory pose of being apolitical provides us with a valuably honest and paradoxical snapshot of political culture an (unknowing) point of radical change.

Ireland, Philadelphia and the Re-Invention of America, 1760–1800 , and: John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty (review)

Ireland, Philadelphia and Re-Invention of America, 1760-1800. By Maurice J. Brie. (Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2008. Pp. xix, 363. Cloth, $65.00.)John Wilkes: Scandalous Father of Civil Liberty. By Arthur H. Cash. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 482. Illustrations. Cloth, $37.50.)Reviewed by Andrew ShankmanSome momentous developments occurred during last third of eighteenth century, and John Wilkes was certainly part of them. Arthur Cash has written an enjoyable biography of libertine, civil libertarian, and popular symbol of protest. Cash's treatment seeks to remind those who might have forgotten that Wilkes was eighteenth century's principal champion of free speech and a free press and primary reason for end of general warrants, warrants for arrest that did not need to name parties charged. Cash's book, in part, seeks to explain how a Whig functionary became May 1763 . . . what in English history is called a (118).Cash re-creates bizarre, self-indulgent, and usually scatological circles in which Wilkes was happiest. These circles included leading lords, gentlemen, and cultural luminaries such as Diderot, Dr. Johnson and Boswell, Smollett, Garrick, and Hogarth. One of pleasures of book is to keep track of household and near-household names Wilkes knew. Assuming that readers of J ER know why Wilkes matters - and probably give a lecture about every other year in which liberty-loving colonists eat 45 dishes at public dinners and drink 45 toasts from bowls weighing 45 ounces - let me suggest some thoughts that will also lead to Maurice Bric's treatment of Irish immigrants and radical politics in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia.A bit too often, Cash presents Wilkes as agent of Whiggish progress: Since time of Charles II, he writes, the whole of political activity had been contest for control of state between king and his ministers on one side and privileged gentlemen of Parliament on other. Now common folk had entered into play (162). And Cash quotes with full approval from a 1963 study: The transference of political authority from government and law to people and law may be dated from cases revolving about North (133). In fact, it's more interesting to see Wilkes's escapades hearkening simultaneously forward and backward. To be sure, Wilkes became a symbol for radicals and reformers because subjects of Britain's limited constitutional monarchy expected a great deal more than pre- 1688 subjects did. In addition, eighteenth-century print culture and its robust public sphere provided Wilkes with opportunity to act as something of an independent agent stirring waters to better his position and challenge authority. Wilkes could be Wilkes in large part because of modern opportunities available to private men to speak directly to public and to chase popularity.But Wilkes was also a minor Whig and creature of Pitt/Chatham. Pitt and Wilkes's more immediate patrons, such as Earl Temple, could use him to say things in North Briton that they wanted said, but that were inconvenient for them to say about king and His Majesty's intimates. In starting North Briton, Wilkes operated in a venerable tradition occupied by royal critics such as Elizabethan pamphleteer John Stubbs, who protested Anjou Match on behalf of leading privy councilors. How unique was Wilkes when as far back as 1580s members of Parliament and Lords Mayor of London (a position Wilkes eventually occupied) led, at secret behest of crown advisors, violent protests against embassies of Catholic monarchies? Even Protector Somerset knew advantages of popularity and appeals to angry crowds and tried to deploy some of riots often called Kett's Rebellion to awe rivals at court. Pamphleteers and rowdy crowds were, in complex and not unambiguously edifying ways, part of nobles' and gentlemen's high politics for far longer than Cash allows. …

Book Reviews

MankindVolume 6, Issue 9 p. 438-450 Book Reviews First published: June 1967 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1835-9310.1967.tb01031.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat Abstract Book reviewed in this article: Social Anthropology. By Godfrey Lienhardt Rethinking Anthropology. By E. R. Leach Societies: Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives. By Talcott Parsons Kinship and Family Organization. Bernard Farber The Impact of Urbanization in By G. Breese. Societies Series. Cliffs, N.J., 1965. Paperbound, no price stated. Industry. By W. E. Moore; Newly Developing Countries The Hunters. By Elman R. Service The New Guinea Villager. By C. D. Rowley. F. W. Cheshire Behind the Ranges: Patrolling in New Guinea. By J. P. Sinclair Australian Aboriginal Portraits. By Charles P. Mountford Animal Species and Their Evolution. By A. J. Cain The Concise Encyclopadia of Archaeology. Edited by Leonard Cottrell Archaeology: An Introduction. By Clement W. Meighan Marine Archaeology. Edited by Joan du Plat Taylor The Land of Shinar. By Leonard Cottrell Ancient Europe: A Survey. By Stuart Piggott The North Britons: the Prehistory of a Border People. By Richard Feachem The Hardin Village Site. By Lee H. Hanson Pattern and Process in the Early Intermediate Pottery of the Central Coast of Peru. By Thomas C. Patterson Volume6, Issue9June 1967Pages 438-450 RelatedInformation

High Art and Low Politics: A New Perspective on John Wilkes

In 1777, towards the end of his colourful career as a radical politician, John Wilkes (1725-1797) became the first politician to advocate the creation of a national gallery in Britain. More familiar for his opposition periodical The North Briton and the riotous Middlesex Campaign of 1768, Wilkes’s beliefs on the limits of royal authority with respect to parliament and the people were also expressed in his lifelong activities in support of the ‘polite arts’ in Britain. Building on his friendships with Denis Diderot and J.J. Winckelmann, as well as his links to London’s mercantile class, he challenged contemporaries who saw Britain’s commercial prowess as irreconcilable with such moral improvements. When juxtaposed to his attempts at parliamentary reform, his demonstration of liberty’s importance for the arts raised the prospect of greater public access to culture, as well as to the franchise.

North Britishness and the nature of eighteenth-century British patriotisms

ABSTRACTThe identity of eighteenth-century North Britons needs to be disaggregated: there were significant variations in North British attitudes to the Anglo-Scottish relationship in areas such as politics, economics, language, religion and manners. In the first-order spheres of politics and economics North Britons generally subscribed to an Anglo-British identity and tended to welcome anglicization of Scotland's feudal institutions and laws as an acceleration along the pathway of modernization. Although this crucial aspect of North British identity became widespread only from the 1730s its roots can be traced back to the sophisticated debates which hadprecededScottish agreement to incorporating Union. This adherence to an Anglo-British form of patriotism was a common feature of political discourse in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. North British patriotism also shared another prominent characteristic with Anglo-Irish and American identities. The aspiration to share English liberties to the full, when thwarted, could trigger anglophobic responses, as occurred in America in the 1760s and 70s, and in the Irish constitutional revolution of 1780–2. Among North Britons, a coherent Anglo-British ideology of improvement co-existed with a traditional Scottish chauvinism, which was normally dormant, but whose occasional eruptions tended to be provoked by perceived exclusions of North Britons from the liberties of Englishmen.

Political Controversy: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Propaganda.

Preface Masks, Readers, and Style A Very Different Kind of Reviewing: The Essay-Sheets and Related Publications A Very Different Kind of Reviewing: II. Editor's Notes and Comments Aftermath as Climax: North Briton, No. 45 Bibliography Index

Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America

Eighty percent of Americans have no British ancestors. According to David Hackett Fischer, however, their day-to-day lives are profoundly influenced by folkways transplanted from Britain to the New World with the first settlers. Residual, yet persistent, aspects of these 17th Century folkways are indentifiable, Fischer argues, in areas as divers as politics, education, and attitudes towards gender, sexuality, age, and child-raising. Making use of both traditional and revisionist scholarship, this ground-breaking work documents how each successive wave of early emigration-Puritans to the North-East; Royalist aristocrats to the South; the Friends to the Delaware Valley; Irish and North Britons to the American backcountry-contributed to, and continue to affect, ingrained cultural differences between various regions in the United States.

A Revised Date for a Note from John Wilkes to Bonnell Thornton

In my essay, Have At You All: or, Bonnell Thornton's Journalism, Huntington Library Quarterly, 44 (1981): 278, I constructed circumstantial case for assigning date of 3 May 1763 to note from John Wilkes to Bonnell Thornton (Huntington Library Ms. HM 22782) in which Wilkes asks Thornton to plant an excerpt from the Parliamentary History in the Public Advertiser. Access to more perfect file of the Public has allowed me to locate the excerpt in the issue of 10 November 1763, pp. 1-2, and thus definitively to date the note as being written on Tuesday 8 November 1763. Rather than squib meant to prepare the public for Wilkes' appearance in the Court of Common Pleas on 6 May 1763, the excerpt, instead, was intended to anticipate Wilkes' complaint of breach of privilege before the House of Commons at its opening session on 15 November 1763. In the event, Wilkes' complaint was superseded by George Grenville's delivering message from the king asking that the House consider the case against North Briton No. 45. After debate lasting into the early morning hours, North Briton No. 45 was voted a false, scandalous, and seditious libel and ordered to be burnt by the common hangman. On the same day, in the House of Lords, the earl of Sandwich launched his notorious attack on Wilkes' (and Thomas Potter's) Essay on Woman. The next day Wilkes was gravely wounded in duel with Samuel Martin resulting from remarks made by Martin during the Commons debate of the previous date. In all, 15 November, the day anticipated by Wilkes in the note of 8 November, proved nearly to be his undoing. Let me add that the revised dating of the note in no way alters my general conclusions about Thornton's relations with Wilkes. Thornton in November was only continuing what he had been doing since at least May: serving as an important ally in Wilkes' campaign to manipulate the media.

Scotophilia and Humphry Clinker: The Politics of Beggary, Bugs, and Buttocks

Many scholars have commented on Horace Walpole's words about Humphry Clinker: 'a party novel, written by the profligate hireling Smollett, to vindicate the Scots and cry down juries.' Behind Walpole's hyperbole lies fact: Smollett's attempt to wean the English from their inveterate animus against his native land. Habitual scorn had turned into active hatred, fanned by party writers opposed to the court, during the years of Lord Bute's influence, the earlier 1760s. This concentrated attack, I propose, established an agenda for the irenic Humphry Clinker (1771) by setting forth a number of topics, charges against the Scots, which Smollett tried to annul or, if possible, to turn to his own persuasive advantage. I am led to this general hypothesis by joining two facts. The first, from the novel itself, sticks in the memory of every reader. When the titular hero comes upon the scene, he is so ragged that his buttocks show through his clothes, thus amusing Jery, entrancing Winifred, and outraging Tabby. He has also been ill and hungry, 'his looks denote famine,' and Tabby sums him up as 'a filthy tatterdemalion ... [who will] fill the room full of vermin: a 'mangy hound' (Jery, 24 May). The second fact does not stick in the memories of present-day readers but, I suggest, stuck at least in the unconscious memories of readers in Smollett's day. It is that, although Humphry is of English birth, the anti-Scots propaganda ofthe 1760s made bare buttocks, beggarliness, mange, and filth standard accusations against 'North Britons.'

Charles Churchill's Political Journalism

IN THE GREAT war that was fought at the beginning of King George III's reign in the early 1760s over his Scottish adviser Lord Bute and the Treaty of Paris, no writer was more in the public eye than Charles Churchill. His poetic career, beginning with the spectacular success of The Rosciad, and continuing with such propagandistic poems as The Prophesy of Famine and The Duellist, earned him widespread contemporary fame. But less known today, and yet of enormous interest in his own time, was his work on the North Briton, perhaps the most influential political essay journal of the eighteenth century. His contributions are worth studying for several reasons: for their literary merit as examples of sophisticated irony, for their relevance to the development of the reform movement in politics, and for their biographical interest as constituting a salient episode in Churchill's meteoric and tragic career. At the outset of the paper war, when political cartoons began to multiply against Bute, one in particular attracts the interest of the student of Churchill's career as a political propagandist. The Hungry Mob of Scriblers and Etchers depicts the radiant figure of Bute somewhat foppishly dressed with a feathered hat and long cape, proudly displaying his newly won symbol of the Order of the Garter on his delicately slender calf. Daintily descending a staircase above a crowd of meanly garbed journalists and printmakers, Bute carries a moneybag in one hand and with the other flings coins toward his supporters and apologists, among whom can be identified Dr. Samuel Johnson and William Hogarth. The crowd, however, also contains some of Bute's literary opponents. Matthew Darly, for example, prominently displays one of the most scabrous anti-Bute etchings, The Screen, which alludes to Bute's love affair with George III's mother, the Princess Dowager. Meanwhile, the unmistakable

Mark Twain's First Lecture: A Parallel

Research Article| November 01 1956 Mark Twain's First Lecture: A Parallel Paul Fatout Paul Fatout Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Pacific Historical Review (1956) 25 (4): 347–354. https://doi.org/10.2307/3636500 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paul Fatout; Mark Twain's First Lecture: A Parallel. Pacific Historical Review 1 November 1956; 25 (4): 347–354. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/3636500 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentPacific Historical Review Search This content is only available via PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Junius as the author of 'The North Briton' a note on the Rev. Allen's 'Junius Unmasked' (1828)

Junius as the author of 'The North Briton' a note on the Rev. Allen's 'Junius Unmasked' (1828) Get access Francesco Cordasco, Jr. Francesco Cordasco, Jr. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume CXCVI, Issue sep15, 15 September 1951, Page 413, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/CXCVI.sep15.413a Published: 15 September 1951

Reviews of Books

Journal Article Reviews of Books Get access The North Briton: A Study in Political Propaganda. By GEORGE NOBBE. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939.) L. B. NAMIER L. B. NAMIER Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume LVII, Issue CCXXVI, April 1942, Pages 274–275, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/LVII.CCXXVI.274 Published: 01 April 1942

Francis Jeffrey in America

an American girl is no news to readers of old books of reminiscences. But most of the details of the episode were suppressed by his official biographer,' and Jeffrey's most important letters about it have never been in print. How he got into an enemy country in wartime, irritated Boston society, and brawled so audaciously with President Madison that the gossips on both sides of the Atlantic remembered the incident for fifty years, is a story that deserves telling. The story really begins in the early i780's, when Mary Wilkes Storke Hayley,2 a mordantly witty old lady with no inhibitions whatever, came to Boston from London to look after valuable properties bequeathed her by two deceased husbands. Mrs. Hayley was almost as notorious as her brother, John Wilkes, the demagogue of North Briton fame, for she was an outrageous bluestocking who hated women (including her daughter), had a reserved seat at the Old Bailey, where she gave unmoved and unblushing earnestness of attention to the most shockingly indecent criminal trials, and in her conversation seldom permitted any ideas of... delicacy to impose a restraint on her observations. It may have been mere rumor that she brought with her to Boston an American gentleman whom she honestly intended to marry and then jilted, but it is unquestionable that in 1786, at the age of seventy, she married a man of thirty-eight. The gentleman was Patrick Jeffrey, agent for a British mercantile house,