[50] Boswell's Life of Johnson, eighth edition, vol. iv., p. 93.
[51] History of London, vol. ii., p. 925.
[52] The Tatler. With notes historical, biographical, and critical 8vo. 1797. Vol. iv., p. 206.
[53] Pennant's London, p. 377.
[54] Of William III.
[55] The genius of Clarke, which, agreeably to his unhappy end, was tender and melancholy, was unsuited to the livelier intoxication of Dryden's feast, afterwards gloriously set by Handel. Clarke has been styled the musical Otway of his time. He was organist at St. Paul's, and shot himself at his house in St. Paul's Churchyard. Mr. John Reading, organist of St. Dunstan's, who was intimately acquainted with him, was going by at the moment the pistol went off, and upon entering the house "found his friend and fellow-student in the agonies of death." Another friend of his, one of the lay vicars of the cathedral, relates of him, that a few weeks before the catastrophe, Clarke had alighted from his horse in a sequestered spot in the country, where there was a pond surrounded by trees, and not knowing whether to hang or drown himself, tossed up a piece of money to see which. The money stuck in the earth edgeways. Of this new chance for life, poor Clarke, we see, was unable to avail himself.
[56] See Maitland, vol. ii., p. 949.
[57] Since this was written, the jurisdiction of the Ecclesiastical Court in Doctors' Commons on matters of divorce has been transferred to a new "Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes," sitting at Westminster.
[58] Londinium Redivivum, vol. ii., p. 473.
[59] On the authority of Langton, Johnson's friend. See Memoirs, Anecdotes, &c., by Letitia Matilda Hawkins, vol. i., p. 293.