150 Presidentship of Sir Joseph Banks 1780 



is no indication of who he was, he may have been the emi- 

 nent lawyer, afterwards known as Baron Stowell, who 

 walked with Johnson next day to see the ruin wrought by 

 the Gordon rioters, and whom Johnson esteemed so highly 

 as to make him one of his three executors and to leave him 

 a little memento of his friendship. 1 



Few foreigners appeared at the table of the Club during 

 1780. The Baron de Nolcken dined there twice in May. 

 He was active this year in his efforts on the part of Sweden 

 to mediate between Great Britain and the States General 

 of the United Provinces. Baron Manteuffel and M. Tiemand 

 dined in the spring, and Herr Wield of Berne and Mr. 

 Bridgen in the autumn. Towards the end of the year a 

 French naturalist appeared, Pierre Augustus Broussonet, 

 who at the early age of 17 had made his mark by the pro- 

 duction of a thesis on the respiration of plants. He was 

 only 19 when he arrived in England, where he remained for 

 more than a j^ear engaged upon a treatise in ichthyology. 

 He was a frequent guest of the Club during his stay. The 

 friends whom he made here must have watched with keen 

 interest his subsequent career : how first he taught at the 

 College de France as the deputy of Daubenton and was 

 elected into the Academy of Sciences ; how during the time 

 of the Revolution he entered the National Assembly and 

 under the Convention was charged with being a Girondist 

 and forced to escape from France ; how he lived successively 

 at Madrid, Lisbon and Morocco ; how under the Empire 

 better days dawned for him and he was appointed French 

 Consul at Morocco ; how driven thence by the plague, he 



1 Sir Henry Holland, who knew Lord Stowell in his later years, has de- 

 scribed evenings passed with him in his house in Graf ton Street : " The 

 whimsical roll of Lord Stowell's shoulder, when uttering some interlocutory 

 phrase of dry humour, was worth more to the eye than any amount of 

 speech to the ear. His house curiously illustrated the habits of the man, 

 in its utter destitution of all the appliances of luxury or comfort. The 

 furniture was never either changed or cleaned. Year after year I wrote 

 prescriptions there with the same solitary pen the single one, I believe, 

 in his possession, and rarely used by him after his retirement from public 

 business. I believe the anecdote to be mainly true that Lord Stowell 

 visited most of the shitting sights of London, but did not go beyond this 

 price." Recollections of Past Life, p. 194. 



