1. Eliphalet Fitch, receiver general of Jamaica and JA’s second cousin through the Boylston family, was a native of Boston and a wealthy West Indies merchant. As the postscript indicates, he was traveling with another of JA’s second cousins, Ward Nicholas Boylston. Born Ward Hallowell (son of Mary Boylston Hallowell, first cousin of JA’s mother), he changed his name upon the promise of an inheritance from his uncle Nicholas Boylston. The two men reached Paris by 22 May, and JA dined with Fitch on the 23d (AFC description begins Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield, Marc Friedlaender, Richard Alan Ryerson, Margaret A. Hogan, and others, Cambridge, 1963–. description ends , 5:173; JA, D&A description begins Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield and others, Cambridge, 1961; 4 vols. description ends , 1:295; 3:128, 134). The two men also carried a letter from another first cousin of JA’s mother, John Boylston, dated 3 May (not found). JA replied to the letters from the two Boylstons on 12 June (both LbC, APM Reel 108).

2. Virgil was born near Mantua (now Mantova, Italy) in Cisalpine Gaul (Oxford Classical Dicy. description begins Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3d edn., New York, 1996. description ends ).