_Mr. Penton._ Henry Penton (1736-1812), M.P. for Winchester and a Lord of
the Admiralty.
_a certain Great Personage._ On their tour of the militia camps at
Winchester and Salisbury in September, the King and Queen “alighted at
Mr. Penton’s house [in Winchester], where they were waited on by the
Mayor and Corporation” (_The Annual Register_ for 1778, “Appendix to the
Chronicle,” p. 235).
_Mr. Burke._ Edmund Burke (1729-1797), M.P. for Bristol. The dominant
theme of Burke’s speech, “the ruin of this declining empire” was a
favorite one among anti-ministerial orators, pamphleteers, and poets
during the Revolution. Soon after the appearance, in 1781, of the second
and third volumes of Gibbon’s _Decline and Fall_, Thomas Powys, M.P. for
Northamptonshire, read extracts from that work in a debate on a motion
for putting an end to the American war. Powys ventured to say that the
description of Rome in the Fifth Century by Mr. Gibbon,
whose enrolment in the administration was the only accession of
which his Majesty’s ministers had to boast, ... was so strong,
so expressive, so applicable, that though it was said to belong
to Rome, he could not help thinking that it alluded to a nearer
country, and a nearer period (_Parliamentary History_, XXII,
805).