[909] In the original undigested.
[910] Johnson's Works, vi. 113.
[911] In the spring of 1784, after the king had taken advantage of Fox's India Bill to dismiss the Coalition Ministry. See post, March 28, 1784.
[912] In Ireland there was no act to limit the duration of parliament. One parliament sat through the whole reign of George II—thirty-three years. Dr. Lucas, a Dublin physician, in attacking other grievances, attacked also this. In 1749 he would have been elected member for Dublin, had he not, on a charge of seditious writings, been committed by the House of Commons to prison. He was to be confined, he was told, 'in the common hall of the prison among the felons.' He fled to England, which was all that the government wanted, and he practised as a physician in London. In 1761 he was restored to the liberties of the City of Dublin and was also elected one of its members. Hardy's Lord Charlemont, i. 249, 299; and Gent. Mag., xx. 58 and xxxi. 236.
[913] Boswell himself falls into this 'cant.' See post, Sept. 23, 1777.
[914] Johnson's Works, vi. II.
[915] Ib. p. 13. He vigorously attacks the style in which these 'Memoirs' are written. 'Sometimes,' he writes, 'the reader is suddenly ravished with a sonorous sentence, of which, when the noise is past, the meaning does not long remain.' Ib. p. 15.
[916] The author of Friendship in Death.
[917] In the _Lives of the Poets (Works, viii. 383) Johnson writes:—'Dr Watts was one of the first authors that taught the Dissenters to court attention by the graces of language. Whatever they had among them before, whether of learning or acuteness, was commonly obscured and blunted by coarseness and inelegance of style. He showed them that zeal and purity might be expressed and enforced by polished diction.'
[918] 'Such he [Dr. Watts] was as every Christian Church would rejoice to have adopted.' Ib. p. 380. See also post, July 7, 1777, and May 19, 1778.