Manchester Afeiiioirs, Vol. xlv. (1901), No. 8. 19 



In another part of the letter there is a long story that 

 yEneas Anderson had sold his wife for ^50 to Caesar 

 Tobin. This was a canard circulated by Lord Henry 

 Murray, and it seems strange that it should have been 

 believed, and that the victim should not have been liked 

 by Captain Cable. /Eneas Anderson, to whom Cable 

 alludes as the Chinese Traveller, belonged to a well-known 

 Manx family, and may be considered a clever and expe- 

 rienced man. In the years 1792-4, he accompanied Earl 

 Macartney, British Ambassador to China, and published 

 a most interesting account of the Embassy, which, it may 

 be noted, went to Pekin by way of the Pacific, and 

 returned round the Cape of Good Hope, so that they 

 completed the circuit of the globe. Anderson afterwards 

 served under Sir Ralph Abercromby in the Mediterranean, 

 at which time he was a lieutenant in the 40th Regiment. 

 In 1802 he published an excellent "Journal of the Forces 

 in Egypt under Sir Ralph Abercromby." Mr. Anderson 

 afterwards resided in London, where it is to be hoped he 

 found more congenial societ}'. Caesar Tobin and Lord 

 Henry Murray were respectively Captain and Colonel in 

 the same Manx Regiment in which Anderson, at the date 

 of these letters, also had a commission. The whole story, 

 therefore, favours the idea of a messroom jest. It is suffi- 

 ciently interesting as showing the boisterous mood of the 

 period. The belief that the sale of a wife is a valid 

 contract surviv-es even to this day in certain remote 

 quarters of the North of England, though, of course, there 

 has never been any justification for the idea. 



On March 13th, Cable writes : — 



After a number of fruitless enquiries I have at last met with a little 

 Poney, which I think will suit my friend John : and as Brew means to sail 

 this day I shall put it on board his vessel, and consign it to the care of Mr 



