Lindley Murray born (7-6-1745)

(My note from the 2018 Linguistic Birthday sequence)
Born Harper Tavern, Pennsylvania. Had a successful legal practice in New York, but suffering from chronic poor health (which Wiki suggests was
post-polio syndrome) he retired to England (!) in 1784.
His English Grammar (1785) was, along with that of Robert Lowth, the most influential of the late 18th-early 19th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindley_Murray
(from Crystal) The grammar was written at the request of teachers at a boarding school for young ladies, which Murray had helped to establish.
This was in York, where he lived his later years (†1826).
By 1850 the grammar had sold more than two million copies.
Lindley Murray was very famous indeed. "He is mentioned in novels by George Eliot, Mark Twain, Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and others.... Charles Dickens, in _The Old Curiosity Shop_, tells how Mrs Jarley in her waxworks exhibition 'altered the face and costume of Mr Grimaldi as clown to represent Mr Lindley Murray as he appeared when engaged in the composition of his English Grammar'.