50 EARLY LIFE. 



were justly consigned by the manifest indications 

 prevailing throughout them all of splenetic temper, 

 of personal malignity, and of a constant disturbance 

 of the judgment by these vile unworthy passions. 

 The same hostility towards the person of the Princi- 

 pal even involved this reckless man in a quarrel with 

 his eldest son : it led to a duel, in which neither 

 party was hurt an accommodation having taken place 

 on the field. I have heard Stuart's second say that 

 he was obliged, knowing his friend's intemperate 

 habits, to oppose the proposal which he made with 

 his usual want of conduct, and, indeed, of right 

 feeling that all the parties should dine together on 

 quitting the field ! That second (Mr James Gray), 

 an able and an honourable man, always admitted 

 Stuart's unjustifiable conduct towards the historian, 

 one of whose nieces he (the second) afterwards married. 

 Stuart's dissipation continued unbroken, excepting by 

 his occasional literary work ; and he died of a dropsy 

 in 1786, at the early age of forty. 



Such was the man and such his fate who assailed 

 Dr Adam with a bitterness and pertinacity as signal 

 as he had shown towards the great historian. His 

 admirable Grammar was received universally by the 

 literary and didactive world (by the scholar as well 

 as the teacher) with the approbation which it so 

 well deserved ; but it had one fault it was on a 

 subject on which Stuart's cousin, Euddiman, had 

 published a book. This was enough to enlist Stuart's 

 ferocity against both the work and the writer. He 



