Philip Thicknesse is one of the undeservedly forgotten figures of the eighteenth century. He wrote twenty-four books, including the first Life of Thomas Gainsborough, whom he claims to have discovered and which contains accounts of pictures which have disappeared, "A Treatise on the Art of Decyphering and of Writing in Cypher with an Harmonic Alphabet," and the aforementioned account of a journey through France and Spain which contains one of the earliest sympathetic descriptions of Montserrat. Thicknesse led far from a dull life and its course was marked by a series of violent quarrels. Born in 1719 he was in Georgia with General Oglethorpe in 1735. Later he fought wild negroes in Jamaica and cruised in the Mediterranean with Admiral Medley. In 1762 he had a dispute with Francis Vernon (afterwards Lord Orwell and Earl of Shipbrooke) then Colonel of the Suffolk militia; and having sent the Colonel the ridiculous present of a wooden gun became involved in an action for libel with the result that he was confined three months in the King's Bench Prison and fined £300. He was married three times. For his son, by his second marriage, Baron Audley, he conceived a deep hatred of which there is an echo in his will wherein he desires his right hand to be cut off and sent to Lord Audley to remind him of his duty to God after having so long abandoned the duty he owed to his father. The title of his last book also bears witness to this feud: "Memoirs and Anecdotes of Philip Thicknesse, late Lieutenant Governor of Land Guard Fort and unfortunately father to George Touchet, Baron Audley." In 1774 his twenty year friendship with Gainsborough ended in a wretched squabble. In 1775 a decree of chancery ratified by the House of Lords, to which he appealed, deprived him of what he considered his right to £12,000 from the family of his first wife. Feeling himself driven out of his country, accompanied by his third wife, two children and a monkey, he went to live in Spain, but he was back in England in a year and published the book from which I have quoted. His third wife, Anne Ford, was celebrated as a musician and you may find some account of her in the old Grove's Dictionary. She played the guitar, the viola de gamba, and the "musical glasses" and sang airs by Handel and the early Italians. The customs inspector at Cette on the way to Spain found "a bass viol, two guittars, a fiddle, and some other musical instruments" in Thicknesse's baggage. Thicknesse died in 1792 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Boulogne. The greater part of his work in Spain is devoted to an account of Montserrat, which he visited before its despoliation.