1. Pomeroys & Hodgkin were linen drapers with offices at no. 144 Leadenhall Street; from the contents of this note it appears that they had a substantial New England trade. [Henry] Kent’s Directory For the Year 1770 (London, 1770), p. 141.

2. Samuel Cooper, whom BF had known for years, was minister of the Brattle Square Church in Boston; see above, IV, 69–70 n.

3. Nicholas Boylston (1716–1771), a wealthy Boston merchant, was a nephew of Dr. Zabdiel Boylston, the physician who introduced inoculation for smallpox in North America (see above, VIII, 283 n), and a first cousin of John Adams’ mother. Boylston left £1,500 to Harvard for the Boylston Professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory, the first occupant of which was John Quincy Adams. For Boylston, see New England Hist. and Geneal. Reg., VII (1853), 146–9, and Josiah Quincy, The History of Harvard University (Cambridge, 1840), pp. 214–15.

4. It was, however, the University of Edinburgh from which BF procured Cooper an S.T.D. in the summer of 1767; see below, pp. 218–19.

5. On the address page of this letter BF drafted an epitaph for Margaret Ross, the daughter of his friend, John Ross; see below, p. 118.