Note 202 — A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY (continued 2)

Dr. Lort was Librarian, not Chaplain, to the Duke of Devonshire. He moved in the Johnson set. For nineteen years he held the Rectory of St. Matthew’s, Friday Street, in which church (now demolished) there was a tablet to his memory. He died at 6 Savile Row, Nov. 5, 1790, after a carriage accident at Colchester. A water-colour portrait of him, by Sylvester Harding, is in the British Museum Print Room. In her diary Madam D’Arblay gives an entertaining picture of Dr. Lort as he appeared in the Thrale circle at Streatham, where on one occasion he talked against Dr. Johnson to his face without, it seems, any tragic results. “His manners,” she says, “are somewhat blunt and odd, and he is altogether out of the common road, without having chosen a better path.”