_Richard Oswald_ (Vol. viii., p. 442.)--Your Querist will find many letters
to and from him in Franklin's _Memoirs_. He was for some years a merchant
in the city of London. In 1759 he purchased the estate of Auchincruive, in
the county of Ayr, and died there in 1783. No memoir of him has ever been
published. He was for many years an intimate friend of Lord Shelbourne, who
sent him to Paris in 1782, and again in 1783, to negotiate with Franklin,
with whom he had been for some time acquainted. During the Seven Years' War
he acted as commissary-general to the allied armies under the Duke of
Brunswick, who said of him in the official despatches, that "England had
sent him commissaries fit to be generals, and generals not fit to be
commissaries."