[244] 'He left not faction, but of that was left.' Absalom and Achitophel, l. 568.
[245] Boswell wrote of Gibbon in 1779:—'He is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our Literary Club to me.' Letters of Boswell, p.242. See ante, ii.443, note 1.
[246] The schools in this sense means a University.
[247] See ante, ii.224.
[248] Up to the year 1770, controverted elections had been tried before a Committee of the whole House. By the Grenville Act which was passed in that year they were tried by a select committee. Parl. Hist. xvi. 902. Johnson, in The False Alarm (1770), describing the old method of trial, says;—'These decisions have often been apparently partial, and sometimes tyrannically oppressive.' Works, vi. 169. In The Patriot (1774), he says:—'A disputed election is now tried with the same scrupulousness and solemnity as any other title.' Ib. p.223. See Boswell's Hebrides, Nov.10.
[249] Miss Burney describes a dinner at Mr. Thrale's, about this time, at which she met Johnson, Boswell, and Dudley Long. Mme. D'Arblay's Diary, ii. 14.
[250] See ante, ii.171, post, two paragraphs before April 10, 1783, and May 15, 1784.
[251] Johnson wrote on May i, 1780:—'There was the Bishop of St. Asaph who comes to every place.' Piozzi Letters, ii. 111. Hannah More, in 1782, describes an assembly at this Bishop's. 'Conceive to yourself 150 or 200 people met together dressed in the extremity of the fashion, painted as red as Bacchanals...ten or a dozen card-tables crammed with dowagers of quality, grave ecclesiastics and yellow admirals.' Memoirs, i.242. He was elected a member of the Literary Club, 'with the sincere approbation and eagerness of all present,' wrote Mr. (afterwards Sir William) Jones; elected, too, on the same day on which Lord Chancellor Camden was rejected (ante, iii. 311, note 2). Two or three years later Sir William married the Bishop's daughter. Life of Sir W Jones, pp.240, 279.
[252] 'Trust not to looks, nor credit outward show; The villain lurks beneath the cassocked beau.' Churchill's Poems (ed. 1766), ii.41.
[253] No. 2.