1 In 1865, upon the death of his uncle, William Stirling-Maxwell (1818–78) became the ninth baronet of Pollok, County Renfrew (Scotland). He was a doctor of law, member of Parliament for Perthshire (1852–68, 1874–78), lord rector of the University of Edinburgh, and the author of several works of history. John Lothrop Motley described him as “mild, amiable, bald-headed, scholarlike, a Member of Parliament and a man of fortune” (Motley to Mary Motley, 28 May 58, Motley, 1:227–28). Stirling-Maxwell was a member of the Cosmopolitan Club, established in 1852 and described by Sir Wemyss Reid as

Motley said in 1858 that it met “late in the evenings twice a week, Sundays and Wednesdays, in a large room which is the studio of the painter {Henry Wyndham} Phillips, in Charles Street, leading from Berkeley Square” (Motley, 1:227). Ostensibly “free from party colour” and “diversely representative” (although exclusively male) in its membership, the club remained for half a century “the London paradise of the intelligent foreigner” (Escott, 167–69). Among the members Clemens had already met (or would soon meet) were Lord Houghton, John Lothrop Motley, Joaquin Miller, Thomas Hughes, Robert Browning, and Anthony Trollope. Clemens’s reading notes about a two-volume unidentified work (possibly a reminiscence) include the following: “Cosmopolitan Club. 30 Charles St Berkeley □ went there with Lord Houghton several times 11 or 12 pm” (CU-MARK Burke 1904, 1056–57; Boase, 3:761; Trollope, 1:147; 1 and 2 July 73 to Miller, n. 1).