j6 Presidentship of the "Earl of Macclesfield 1760 



Sir Thomas Robinson, or " Long Sir Thomas," as he was 

 familiarly called, dined with the Club on I2th June. He 

 had in his youth travelled in Europe and devoted much of 

 his attention to architecture, which became a dominant 

 taste all through his life. In 1727, when under thirty, he 

 had entered parliament as member for Morpeth. He was 

 created a baronet three years later, and thereafter became 

 a commissioner of excise. He indulged his tastes and dim- 

 inished his fortune by extravagance in entertainments in 

 London and in enclosing and laying out his estate of Rokeby, 

 which he left in the state in which Walter Scott found and 

 described it. His finances were so reduced that he was glad 

 to accept the colonial appointment of Governor of Barbados. 

 But his management of the colony made him so unpopular 

 that after a few years he was recalled in 1747. He had 

 acquired shares in Ranelagh Gardens, and after his return 

 to London he became director of the entertainments at that 

 fashionable resort. His financial difficulties compelled him 

 in 1769 to part with Rokeby, which then became the property 

 of the Morritts, with whom Scott was on terms of such in- 

 timate friendship. " Long Sir Thomas " was so remarkably 

 tall that when he asked Lord Chesterfield for an epigram 

 that witty peer could not resist the temptation to allude 

 to this personal feature when he complied with the request 

 in the following couplet : 



Unlike my subject I will make my song, 

 It shall be witty, and it shan't be long. 



Nor could the same wit refrain in his last illness from 

 saying to his tall friend, " Ah, Sir Thomas, it will be sooner 

 over with me than it would be with you, for I am dying by 

 inches." l Sir Thomas became blind in his old age and 

 died in 1777. 



Another of the Club's guests this year was Lord Auchin- 

 leck, the father of James Boswell, who in his biography of 

 Samuel Johnson has given so good a sketch of him and so 

 many incidents that reveal his idiosyncrasies. He was 



1 Croker quoted in Birkbeck Hill's Edit, of Boswell's Life of Johnson,. 

 i- 434- 



