Page:A history of booksellers, the old and the new.djvu/344

304 304 THE RIV2NGTONS, THE PARKERS, he found himself in debt, and determined to make a bold effort to secure the Rectory of St. George's, Hanover Square. To her great surprise the wife of Lord Chancellor Apsley received an anonymous letter offering her ^"3000 if she would procure Dr. Dodd's presentation to the parish. This insulting proposal was traced to Dodd, and the King ordered that he should be deprived of his chaplaincy. This disgrace, of course, involved him still further, and to extricate himself from these difficulties he was tempted to forge the name of his pupil, Lord Chesterfield, to a bond for 4.200. On the discovery of the forgery, Mr. Manley, a solicitor, called upon the doctor with the bill, leaving it on the table in a room where a fire was burning, when he went out for the obvious pur- pose of refreshment. Dr. Dodd appears to have been too honest to destroy the fatal document, and he was afterwards tried and condemned for forgery, and, spite of all the strenuous efforts of his friends, was exe- cuted on 27th of June, 1777. Alexander Cruden, one of the most useful men who have ever followed the painstaking and praise- worthy profession of index-making, was born in Aber- deen in 1701. An unfortunate passion, which was treated by its unworthy object with great contumely, weakened his senses, and on the discovery that the girl he worshipped was pregnant by her own brother, he went for a short time entirely out of his mind. On his recovery, he was sent to London in the hopes that the difficulty of obtaining position and liveli- hood might act tonically. At one of the first houses at which he called, the door was opened by the wretched girl herself, and poor Cruden rushed off wildly and vacantly into the streets. For many