[114] On the 2nd June, 1790, Lord George Gordon, M.P., a younger son of Cosmo George, third Duke of Gordon, led 100,000 persons in procession to the House of Commons, to present a petition against a measure for relieving Roman Catholics from certain disabilities and penalties. The procession was followed by a riot, which continued several days, and was attended with the destruction of Catholic chapels and private dwellings. The prisons of London, too, were thrown open by the rabble, and the mansion of the chief justice thrown down. Lord George Gordon was tried for high treason, but acquitted. Afterwards convicted of libelling Queen Marie Antoinette of France, and presenting a petition reflecting on the laws and administration of criminal justice, he was committed to Newgate, where he died on the 1st November, 1793. Lord George Gordon evidently laboured under mental aberration, and ought to have been placed in a lunatic asylum. [115] This anecdote is included by Boswell in his “Life of Johnson.” [116] Alexander, tenth Earl of Eglinton, was a friend of the Auchinleck family, and one of Boswell’s early patrons. Born in 1726, he succeeded his father in his third year. A zealous promoter of agriculture, he was much beloved by his tenantry and neighbours. He was mortally wounded by a poacher, whom he sought forcibly to deprive of his firelock: he died on the 25th October, 1769. [117] Dr. Hugh Blair, the celebrated preacher and rhetorician, was a central figure in the literary society of Edinburgh. He was collegiate minister of the High Church, and professor of rhetoric in the University. The first volume of his “Sermons” was published by Strahan, on the recommendation of Dr. Johnson. Dr. Blair was an early patron of Burns, and to his encouragement and active assistance Macpherson was much indebted in producing his first specimens of Ossianic poetry. Dr. Blair died at Edinburgh on the 27th December, 1800, aged eighty-two. [118] James Macpherson, the editor of Ossian, established his residence in London in 1766, in his twenty-eighth year. In 1780 he was elected M.P. for Camelford. He died at Belleville, Inverness-shire, on the 17th February, 1796, aged fifty-eight. Boswell’s allusion to John Bull is explained by the attacks made on Macpherson by Dr. Johnson and other English writers, in reference to the authenticity of Ossian’s poems. [119] Lady Frances Montgomerie was daughter of Alexander, ninth Earl of Eglinton, and sister of the tenth and eleventh earls. She died unmarried. [120] Dr. John Ogilvie, was minister of Midmar, Aberdeenshire. He composed many volumes of poetry, and several of his lyrics have obtained celebrity. He died in 1814, at an advanced age. [121] Captain Robert Temple was younger brother of Boswell’s intimate friend, the Rev. William Johnson Temple, rector of Mamhead. (See _supra_, pp. 36, 47.)