E7S 172 
 
 
r 
 
 REESE LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. 
 
 
 
 . ,694~if. Class No. QifO . f 
 
JAMES : 
 BOSWELL 
 
FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES 
 
 The following Volumes are now ready: 
 
 THOMAS CARLYLE. By HECTOR C. MACPHERSON. 
 
 ALLAN RAMSAY. By OLIPHANT SMEATON. 
 
 HUGH MILLER. By W. KEITH LEASK. 
 
 JOHN KNOX. By A. TAYLOR INNES. 
 
 ROBERT BURNS. By GABRIEL SETOUN. 
 
 THE BALLADISTS. By JOHN GEDDIE. 
 
 RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor HERKLESS. 
 
 SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON. 
 
 THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. GARDEN 
 BLAIKIE. 
 
 JAMES BOSWELL. By W. KEITH LEASK. 
 
JAMES : 
 BOSWELL 
 
 BY 
 W: KEITH 
 
 FAMOUS 
 SCOTS- 
 
 SERIES- 
 
 PUBLISHED BY : 
 CHARLES **i**>J3t 
 
 SCRIBNER'S SONS 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
The designs and ornaments of this 
 volume are by Mr Joseph Brown, 
 and the printing from the press of 
 Messrs Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh. 
 
Co 
 GEORGE BIRKBECK HILL, 
 
 D.C.L. ; 
 
 M.A. Pembroke (Johnson's) College, Oxford ; 
 
 CHIEF OF JOHNSON SCHOLARS AND EDITORS ; 
 
 AND HIMSELF MOST "CLUBABLE" OF MEN. 
 
PREFACE 
 
 THE literature of the Johnsonian period has assumed, 
 in spite of the lexicographer's own dislike of that 
 adjective, prodigious dimensions. After the critical 
 labours of Malone, Murphy, Croker, J. B. Nichols, 
 Macaulay, Carlyle, Rogers, Fitzgerald, Dr Hill and 
 others, it may appear hazardous to venture upon such 
 a well-ploughed field where the pitfalls are so numerous 
 and the materials so scattered. I cannot, however, re- 
 frain from the expression of the belief that in this 
 biography of Boswell will be found something that is 
 new to professed students of the period, and much to 
 the class of general readers that may lead them to re- 
 consider the verdict at which they may have arrived 
 from the brilliant but totally misleading essay by Lord 
 Macaulay. At least, the writer cherishes the hope that 
 it will materially add to the correct understanding and 
 the enjoyment of Boswell's great work, the Life of Johnson. 
 
 My best thanks are due to J. Pearson & Co., 5 Pall 
 Mall Place, London, for the use of unpublished letters 
 by Boswell and of his boyish common-place book. And 
 if " our Boswell " could indulge an honest pride in avail- 
 ing himself of a dedication to Sir Joshua Reynolds, as 
 to a person of the first eminence in his department, so 
 may I entertain the same feeling in inscribing this sketch 
 to Dr Hill who, amid the pressure of other Johnson 
 labours, has yet found time to revise the proof sheets 
 of my book. 
 
 W. K. L. 
 
 ABERDEEN, December 1896. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PAGE 
 
 EARLY DAYS MEETS JOHNSON 1740-63 . 9 
 
 CHAPTER II 
 THE CONTINENT CORSICA 1763-66 35 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 EDINBURGH BAR STRATFORD JUBILEE 1766-69 . 54 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 LOVE AFFAIRS LITERARY CLUB 1766-73 . 76 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES 1773 . . 88 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 EDINBURGH LIFE DEATH OF JOHNSON 1773-84 . 113 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 THE ENGLISH BAR DEATH 1784-95 . . .122 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 IN LITERATURE ...... 143 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 EARLY DAYS MEETS JOHNSON. 1740-1763 
 
 1 Behind yon hills, where Lugar flows.' BURNS. 
 
 * EVERY Scotchman/ says Sir Walter Scott, 'has a 
 pedigree. It is a national prerogative, as inalienable as 
 his pride and his poverty. My birth was neither dis- 
 tinguished nor sordid. 7 What, however, was but a 
 foible with Scott was a passion in James Boswell, who 
 has on numerous occasions obtruded his genealogical 
 tree in such a manner as to render necessary some 
 acquaintance with his family and lineage. The family 
 of Boswell, or Bosville, dates from the Normans who 
 came with William the Conqueror to Hastings. Enter- 
 ing Scotland in the days of the sore saint, David I., 
 they had spread over Berwickshire and established 
 themselves, at least in one branch, at Balmuto in Fife. 
 A descendant of the family, Thomas Boswell, occupies 
 in the genealogy of the biographer the position of 
 prominence which Wat of Harden holds in the line of 
 the novelist. He obtained a grant of the lands in Ayr- 
 shire belonging to the ancient house of Affleck of that 
 ilk, when they had passed by forfeiture into the hands 
 of the king. Pitcairn, in his Collection of Criminal 
 
to FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Trials is inclined to regard this ancestor as the chief 
 minstrel in the royal train of James IV.; but, as he fell 
 at Flodden, this may be taken as being at least not 
 proven, nor would the position of this first literary man 
 in the family have been quite pleasing to the pride of 
 race so often shewn by his descendant. A- Yorkshire 
 branch of the family, with the spelling of their name as 
 Bosville, was settled at Gunthwait in the West Riding, 
 and its head was hailed as 'his chief by Bozzy, whose 
 gregarious instincts led him to trace and claim relation- 
 ship in a way even more than is national. By marriage 
 and other ties the family in Scotland was connected 
 with the most ancient and distinguished houses in the 
 land. 
 
 The great grandfather of the biographer was the Earl 
 of Kincardine who is mentioned by Gilbert Burnet in 
 his History of His Own Time. He had married a 
 Dutch lady, of the noble house of Sommelsdyck who 
 had once held princely rank in Surinam. With that 
 branch also of the name did Boswell, in later years, 
 establish a relationship at the time of his continental 
 tour, when at the Hague he found the head holding 
 'an important charge in the Republick, and is as 
 worthy a man as lives, and has honoured me with his 
 correspondence these twenty years/ From the Earl 
 Boswell boasted 'the blood of Bruce in my veins/ a 
 descent which he seizes every opportunity of making 
 known to his readers, and to which we find him 
 alluding in a letter of loth May, 1786, now before us, 
 to Mickle, the translator of the Lusiad, with a promise 
 to 'tell you what I know about our common ancestor, 
 Robert the Bruce/ When Johnson, in the autumn of 
 1773, visited the ancestral seat of his friend, Boswell, 
 ' in the glow of what, I am sensible, will in a commercial 
 age be considered as a genealogical enthusiasm/ did not 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 11 
 
 forget to remind his illustrious Mentor of his relation- 
 ship to the Royal Personage, George the Third, 'whose 
 pension had given Johnson comfort and independence.' 
 It would have required a much greater antiquarian than 
 Johnson, who could scarcely tell the name of his own 
 grandfather, to have traced the well-nigh twenty genera- 
 tions of connecting links between Bruce and the third 
 of the Guelph dynasty on the throne. 
 
 From Veronica Sommelsdyck, the wife of this royal 
 ancestor (whose title is now merged in the earldom 
 of Elgin), was 'introduced into our family the saint's 
 name/ born by BoswelFs own eldest daughter, and 
 other consequences of a much graver nature were 
 destined to ensue. 'For this marriage/ says Ramsay 
 of Ochtertyre, ' their posterity paid dear/ for to it was 
 due, increased no doubt as it was through the inter- 
 marriages in close degrees between various scions of the 
 house, the insanity which is now recognised by all 
 students of his writings in Bos well himself, and which 
 made its appearance in the clearest way in the case of 
 his second daughter. His grandfather James adopted 
 the profession of law in which he obtained some dis- 
 tinction, and left three children Alexander, the father 
 of the subject of this sketch, John, who followed the 
 practice of medicine, and a daughter Veronica, married 
 to Montgomerie of Lainshaw, whose daughter became 
 the wife of her cousin Bozzy. 
 
 Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck, married his 
 cousin Euphemia Erskine. In the writings of the son 
 the father makes a considerable figure, while his mother, 
 'of the family of Buchan, a woman of almost un- 
 exampled piety and goodness/ as he styles her, is but 
 a dim name in the background, as with John Stuart 
 Mill who has written a copious autobiography, and left it 
 to the logical instincts of his readers to infer that he had a 
 
12 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 mother. The profession of law was adopted by the 
 father, who, after a residence abroad at Leyden where he 
 graduated, passed as advocate at the Scottish bar in 1 729, 
 from which, after a distinguished career, he was appointed 
 to the sheriffdom of Wigton, and ultimately raised to 
 the bench in 1754, with the title of Lord Auchinleck. 
 He possessed, says his son, * all the dignified courtesy 
 of an old baron/ of the school of Cosmo Bradwardine 
 as we may say, and not only was he an excellent 
 scholar, but, from the intimacy he had cultivated with 
 the Gronovii and other literati of Leyden, he was a 
 collector of classical manuscripts and a collator of the 
 texts and editions of Anacreon. His library was rich in 
 curious editions of the classics, and was in some respects 
 not excelled by any private collection in Great Britain, 
 and the reputation of the Auchinleck library was greatly 
 increased by the black-letter tastes and publications of 
 his grandson. A strong Whig and active Presbyterian, 
 he was much esteemed in public and in private life. 
 The son had on his northern tour the pleasure to 
 note, both at Aberdeen and at Inverness, the high regard 
 in which the old judge was held, and to find his name 
 and connection a very serviceable means of introduction 
 to the travellers in their 'transit over the Caledonian 
 hemisphere.' Like the father of Scott, who kept the 
 whole bead-roll of cousins and relations and loved a 
 funeral, Lord Auchinleck bequeathed to his eldest son 
 at least one characteristic, the attention to relatives in 
 the remotest degree of kin. On the bench, like the 
 judges in Redgauntkt, Hume, Kames, and others, he 
 affected the racy Doric; and his 'Scots strength of 
 sarcasm, which is peculiar to a North Briton/ was on 
 many an occasion lamented by his son who felt it, and 
 acknowledged by Johnson on at least one famous 
 occasion. In the Boswelliana are preserved many of 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 13 
 
 old Auchinleck's stories which Lord Monboddo says he 
 could tell well with wit and gravity stories of the 
 circuit and bar type of Braxfield and Eskgrove, such as 
 Scott used to tell to the wits round the fire of the 
 Parliament House. In his younger days he had been 
 a beau, and his affectation of red heels to his shoes and 
 of red stockings, when brought under the notice of his 
 son by a friend, so affected Bozzy that he could hardly 
 sit on his chair for laughing. A great gardener and 
 planter like others of the race of old Scottish judges 
 he had extended, in the classic style of architecture 
 then in fashion, the family mansion, and had, as Johnson 
 found, * advanced the value of his lands with great 
 tenderness to his tenants.' Past the older residence 
 flowed the river Lugar, here of considerable depth, and 
 then bordered with rocks and shaded with wood the 
 old castle whose 'sullen dignity' was the nurse of 
 BoswelFs devotion to the feudal principles and 'the 
 grand scheme of subordination,' of which he lets us 
 hear so much when he touches on 'the romantick 
 groves of my ancestors.' 
 
 James Bos well, the immortal biographer of Johnson, 
 was born in Edinburgh on October 29, 1740. The 
 earliest fact which is known about him is one which 
 he himself would have described as 'a whimsical or 
 characteristical ' anecdote, and which he had told to 
 Johnson: 'Boswell in the year 1745 was a fine boy, 
 wore a white cockade, and prayed for King James, till 
 one of his uncles, General Cochrane, gave him a shilling 
 on condition that he would pray for King George, 
 which he accordingly did. So you see that Whigs of all 
 ages are made the same way.' It may have been these 
 early signs of perversity that led his father to be strict 
 in dealing with him, for we cannot doubt that Boswell 
 in the London Magazine for 1781, is giving us a picture 
 
i 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 of domestic life when he writes as follows : c I knew a 
 father who was a violent Whig, and used to upbraid his 
 son with being deficient in "noble sentiments of liberty," 
 while at the same time he made this son live under his 
 roof in such bondage, that he was not only afraid to stir 
 from home without leave, but durst scarcely open his 
 mouth in his father's presence.' For some time he was 
 privately educated under the tuition of the Rev. John 
 Dun, who was presented in 1752 to the living of 
 Auchinleck by the judge, and finally at the High School 
 and the University of Edinburgh. There he met with 
 two friends with whom, to the close of his life, he was 
 destined to have varied and close relations. One was 
 Henry Dundas, first Lord Melville, and by " Harry the 
 Ninth " Bozzy, in his ceaseless attempts to secure place 
 and promotion, constantly attempted to steer, while 
 that Pharos of Scotland, as Lord Cockburn calls him, 
 was as constantly inclined to be diffident of the abilities, 
 or at least the vagaries, of his suitor. 
 
 The other friend was William Johnson Temple, son 
 of a Northumberland gentleman of good family, and 
 grandfather of the present Archbishop of Canterbury. 
 Temple was a little older than Boswell, who for upwards 
 of thirty-seven years maintained an uninterrupted corre- 
 spondence with him. As he is the Atticus of Boswell, 
 we insert here a detailed account of him in order to avoid 
 isolated references and allusions in the course of the 
 narrative. On leaving Edinburgh he entered Trinity 
 Hall, Cambridge; after taking the usual degrees, he 
 was presented by Lord Lisburne to the living of 
 Mamhead in Devon, which was followed by that of St 
 Gluvias in Cornwall. Strangely enough for one who 
 was an intimate friend of Boswell, he was no admirer 
 of Johnson (whose name, by a curious coincidence, was 
 a part of his own), and a strong Whig and water-drinker, 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 15 
 
 ' a bill which/ says Bozzy humorously, ' was ever one 
 which meets with a determined resistance and opposi- 
 tion in my lower house.' As the friend of Gray and of 
 Mason, he must have been possessed of some share of 
 ability, yet over his moral character the admirers and 
 critics of Boswell are divided. To some he appears 
 as the true and faithful Atticus to the Cicero of his 
 friend, the Mentor and honest adviser in all times of 
 danger and trial. To others he seems but to have 
 possessed, in a minor degree, all the failings of Boswell 
 himself, and it would appear the most natural inference 
 to believe that, had Temple been endowed with greater 
 force of mental or moral character, the results would 
 have been seen in many ways upon the actions of his 
 friend. In his wife he was unfortunate, and, at one 
 time at least, he attempted to secure a colonial chap- 
 laincy in order to effect a separation. He was the 
 writer of an Essay on the Clergy ; their Studies and 
 Recreations, 1774; Historical and Political Memoirs, 
 1777; Abuse of Unrestrained Power, 1778; all of 
 which have completely passed from the memory of 
 man. But he lives with a fair claim to fame, as the 
 correspondent of Boswell, who calls him * best of 
 friends' to 'a weak distemper'd soul that swells in 
 sudden gusts, and sinks again in calms.' A chance 
 memorandum by Temple, on the death of Gray, dis- 
 playing considerable felicity of phrase and insight, was 
 sent by Boswell to the London Magazine of March 
 1772, from which it was copied by Mason in his Life 
 of Gray, and in an adapted form it was used by 
 Johnson himself in his sketch of the poet's work, in 
 his Lives of the Poets. The discovery of the Letters to 
 Temple is one of the happiest accidents in literature, 
 and without them the true life of Boswell could not 
 be written. To neither Macaulay nor Carlyle were they 
 
1 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 known for use in their famous reviews. On the death 
 of Temple in 1796, one year after the decease of his 
 friend, his papers passed into the possession of his son- 
 in-law, who retired to France, where he died. Some 
 fifty years ago, a gentleman making purchases in a 
 shop at Boulogne, observed that the wrapper was a 
 scrap of a letter, which formed part of a bundle bought 
 shortly before from a travelling hawker. On investiga- 
 tion, the letters were found to be the correspondence 
 of Bos well with Temple, and all doubts as to their 
 genuineness were conclusively set at rest by their bear- 
 ing the London and Devon post marks, and the franks 
 of well known names. But the internal evidence alone, 
 as we shall see, would be sufficient to establish their 
 authenticity. Published in 1857 by Bentley, under 
 the careful editorship of Mr Francis, they constitute, 
 along with the no less happy discovery in 1854, behind 
 an old press in Sydney, of Campbell's Diary of a Visit 
 to England though Professor Jowett was inclined to 
 doubt the authenticity of the latter the most valuable 
 accession of evidence to the Johnsonian circle of in- 
 terest, and they shed on Boswell and his method a 
 light which otherwise would leave much in darkness, 
 or, at least, but ensure a general acceptance of the 
 harsher features in the criticism by Macaulay. From 
 the remark by Boswell to Temple * remember and put 
 my letters into a book neatly ; see which of us does it 
 first/ it has been inferred that he meditated, in some 
 sort of altered appearance, their republication. That 
 Temple entertained the same idea on his part we know 
 from his own words, and from the title under which 
 Boswell suggested their issue Remarks on Various 
 Authors, in a Series of Letters to James Boswell, Esq. 
 But that Boswell himself ever did intend the publica- 
 tion of his own must be pronounced, by all that know 
 
JAMES BOS 
 
 what lies behind their printed form, a moral impossi- 
 bility. 
 
 The first preserved letter is dated from Edinburgh, 
 July 29, 1758. It reveals at once the historic Boswell, 
 such as he remained to the close, the cheerful self- 
 confidence, the gregarious instincts, the pleasing air of 
 moralizing, and the easy flow of style. ' Some days 
 ago I was introduced to your friend Mr Hume ; he is 
 a most discreet affable man as ever I met with, and 
 has really a great deal of learning, a choice collection 
 of books ... we talk a good deal of genius, fine 
 learning, improving our style, etc., but I am afraid 
 solid learning is much worn out. Mr Hume is, I 
 think, a very proper person for a young man to 
 cultivate an acquaintance with.' Then he digresses 
 
 to ' my passion for Miss W t,' of whom, he assures 
 
 his friend, he is c excessively fond, so don't be surprised 
 if your grave, sedate, philosophic friend who used to 
 carry it so high, and talk with such a composed in- 
 difference of the beauteous sex, should all at once 
 commence Don Quixote for his adorable Dulcinea.' 
 We catch sight of him, at eighteen, going on the 
 northern circuit with his father and Lord Hailes. 
 There, by the advice of an Edinburgh acquaintance, 
 Love, an old actor at Drury Lane, but then a teacher 
 of elocution in the town, he began 'an exact journal/ 
 and on that journey it was that Hailes made Boswell 
 aware of the fact that was to henceforward colour the 
 entire tide of his life, the existence of Dr Johnson as 
 a great writer in London, ' which grew up in my fancy 
 into a kind of mysterious veneration, by figuring to 
 myself a state of solemn elevated abstraction, in which 
 I supposed him to live in the immense metropolis of 
 London.' Such were the links, the advice of this 
 obscure player to keep a journal, and the report given 
 
1 8 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 to the youth by the judge in their postchaise. As early 
 as December 1758 we hear of his having 'published 
 now and then the production of a leisure hour in the 
 magazines/ and of his life in Edinburgh he writes, 
 "from nine to ten I attend the law class; from ten 
 to eleven study at home, and from one to two attend 
 a class on Roman Antiquities; the afternoon and 
 evening I always spend in study. I never walk ex- 
 cept on Saturdays.' A full allowance, surely, all this 
 for one who regrets his sad impotence in study, and 
 writes the letters to Lord Hailes which we shall quote 
 later. 
 
 Even at this period he betrays the fatal defect which 
 remains with him through life, the indulgence in ' the 
 luxury of noble sentiments/ and the easy and irritating 
 Micawber-like genteel roll with which he turns off a 
 moral platitude or finely vague sentiment, in the belief 
 that good principles constitute good character. 'As 
 our minds improve in knowledge/ he writes, ' may the 
 sacred flame still increase until at last we reach the 
 glorious world above when we shall never be separated, 
 but enjoy an everlasting society of bliss. ... I hope 
 by Divine assistance, you shall still preserve your amiable 
 character amidst all the deceitful blandishments of vice 
 and folly/ While still at Edinburgh he produced The 
 Coquettes, or the Gallant in the Closet, by Lady Houston, 
 but it was ruined on the third night, and found to be 
 merely a translation of one of the feeblest plays of 
 Thomas Corneille. This play was long believed to be 
 by Boswell, but his part was merely the providing the 
 translator with a prologue, nor was the fact revealed 
 till long after by the lady herself. 
 
 In November 1759 he entered the class of moral 
 philosophy under Adam Smith at Glasgow. Perhaps 
 his father had thought that in the more sedate capital 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 19 
 
 of the West, and in close propinquity to Auchinleck, 
 there would be less scope for the long career of eccen- 
 tricities upon which he was now to enter. If such, 
 however, had been the intention, it was destined to a 
 rude awakening. All his life Bozzy affected the com- 
 pany of players, among whom he professed to find ' an 
 animation and a relish of existence/ and at this period 
 he tells us he was flattered by being held forth as a 
 patron of literature. In the course of his assiduous 
 visits to the local theatre he met with an old stage-struck 
 army officer from Ireland, Francis Gentleman, who had 
 sold his commission to risk his chances on the boards. 
 By this worthy an edition of Southern's Oroonoko was 
 dedicated to Boswell, and in the epistle are found some 
 of his qualities : 
 
 ' But when with honest pleasure she can find 
 Sense, taste, religion, and good nature join'd, 
 There gladly will she raise her feeble Voice 
 Nor fear to tell that Boswell is her Choice.' 
 
 Thus early had the youthful patron of the drama 
 blossomed into notoriety, and having also commenced 
 attendance at the Roman Catholic Chapel he had now 
 resolved to become a priest, though curiously enough 
 he began this career by eloping, as we are assured by 
 Ramsay of Ochtertyre, with a Roman Catholic actress. 
 His father followed the pair to London, and there, 
 it would seem, prevailed on the erratic neophyte to 
 abandon his fair partner, whose existence would cer- 
 tainly have been a fatal barrier to the proposed priest- 
 hood. At least, like his friend Gibbon of later days, if 
 he sighed as a lover, he obeyed as a son, and a com- 
 promise by which he was to enter on the profession of 
 arms was effected. His father called on Archibald, 
 
20 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Duke of Argyll, an old campaigner with Marlborough. 
 ' My Lord/ said the Duke, ' I like your son ; this boy 
 must not be shot at for three shillings and sixpence a 
 day. 7 This scene reads like a pre-arranged affair cal- 
 culated to flatter the erratic Bozzy out of his warlike 
 schemes, for which it is clear he was never fitted. 
 Indeed, the true aim was really, as he confesses to 
 Temple, a wish to be * about court, enjoying the hap- 
 piness of the beau monde and the company of men of 
 genius.' Temple had come forward with an offer of a 
 thousand pounds to obtain a commission for him in the 
 Guards, and Boswell assures us repeatedly, *I had 
 from earliest years a love for the military life.' Yet we 
 can with equal difficulty figure ' our Bozzy ' as priest or 
 soldier. Like Hogg who hankered after the post of 
 militia ensign with 'nerves not/ as Lockhart says, 
 * heroically strung/ Boswell in his own Letter to the 
 People of Scotland confesses himself ' not blest with 
 high heroic blood, but rather I think troubled with a 
 natural timidity of personal danger, which it costs me 
 some philosophy to overcome. 1 Nor was his devotion 
 to charmer or chapel likely to weather the dissipated life 
 he led in London. In later life he may have had 
 thoughts of his own feelings when he proposed to 
 publish, from the manuscript in his possession, the life 
 of Sir Robert Sibbald. That antiquary had been pressed 
 by the Duke of Perth to come over to the Papists, and 
 for some time embraced the ancient religion, until the 
 rigid fasting led him to reconsider the controversy and he 
 returned to Protestantism. Bozzy thought the remark 
 of his friend, that as ladies love to see themselves in a 
 glass, so a man likes to see and review himself in his 
 journal, ' a very pretty allusion/ and we may be sure, 
 in spite of his reticence, that his own case was present 
 at the time to his mind. His distressed father enlisted 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 21 
 
 the interest of Lord Hailes, who requested Dr Jortin, 
 Prebendary of St Paul's, to take in hand the flighty 
 youth, and to persuade him to renounce the errors 
 of the Church of Rome for those of the Church of 
 England, for it was plain that Boswell had broken loose 
 from his old moorings, and some middle course might, 
 it was hoped, prove to be possible. ' Your young 
 gentleman/ writes Jortin to Hailes, ' called at my 
 house. I was gone out for the day ; he then left your 
 letter and a note with it for me, promising to be with 
 me on Saturday morning. But from that time to this I 
 have heard nothing of him. He began, I suppose, to 
 suspect some design upon him, and his new friends 
 may have represented me to him as a heretic and an 
 infidel, whom he ought to avoid as he would the 
 plague/ More likely the Catholic fit had passed away. 
 But what a light does this phase, erratic even among his 
 countless vagaries, shed on his relation to Johnson ! 
 Never, we may rest assured, did he tell the sage of this 
 hidden passage in his life; yet how often do we find 
 him putting leading questions to his friend and Mentor 
 on all points of Catholic doctrine and casuistry, purga- 
 tory, and the invocation of the saints, confession, and 
 the mass ! There can be no doubt that this wrench 
 left a deep impress on the confused religious views of 
 Boswell, and this is the clue which explains the opening 
 conversation with Johnson at the beginning of their 
 intimacy. ' I acknowledged/ he writes, * that though 
 educated strictly in the principles of religion, I had for 
 some time been misled into a certain degree of in- 
 fidelity ; but I was now come to a better way of think- 
 ing, and was fully satisfied of the truth of the Christian 
 revelation, though I was not clear as to every point 
 considered to be orthodox.' Never in any way does he 
 refer to this episode of his life, but the Life of Johnson 
 
22 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 is, as we shall have occasion to show, the life in many 
 ways also of its author, who says of himself that, ' from 
 a certain peculiarly frank, open, and ostentatious dis- 
 position which he avows, his history, like that of the 
 old Seigneur Michael de Montaigne, is to be traced in 
 his writings.' 
 
 Left to himself and the guidance of the writer Derrick, 
 1 my first tutor in the ways of London, who shewed me 
 the town in all its variety of departments, both literary 
 and sportive/ he was now busily spelling through the 
 pages of the Gull's Hornbook. From this course 
 of idle dissipation he was saved by the interposition 
 of an Ayrshire neighbour of the family, the Earl of 
 Eglintoun, though were we to credit the account of 
 the waif himself the Earl ' insisted that young Boswell 
 should have an apartment in his house.' Certain it is 
 that by his lordship he was taken to Newmarket and 
 introduced to the members of the Jockey Club. He 
 would appear to have fancied himself a regularly elected 
 member, for here his eccentricity broke forth into a yet 
 more violent form. Calling for pen and paper, while 
 the sporting fraternity gathered round, he produced the 
 Cub at Newmarket, which he printed and dedicated 
 to the Duke of York in a characteristically Boswellian 
 strain. In doggerel which defies rhyme or reason he 
 tells how his patron 
 
 ' By chance a curious cub has got 
 On Scotia's mountains newly caught ; ' 
 
 and then the first of his many portraits drawn by 
 himself, and prophetic of the lover of hospitable boards 
 and good cheer as we know him in his works he 
 describes the writer as 
 
 * Not of the iron race 
 Which sometimes Caledonia grace ; 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 23 
 
 Though he to combat should advance, 
 Plumpness shone in his countenance ; 
 And belly prominent declared 
 That he for beef and pudding cared ; 
 He had a large and ponderous head, 
 That seemed to be composed of lead ; 
 From which hung down such stiff, lank hair, 
 As might the crows in autumn scare.' 
 
 At this time it is likely took place the escapade with 
 which he must have convulsed the gravity of the 
 Edinburgh literati invited to meet Johnson on their 
 return from the Hebrides. ' I told, when Dr Hugh 
 Blair was sitting with me in the pit of Drury Lane, 
 in a wild freak of youthful extravagance I entertained 
 the audience prodigiously by imitating the lowing of 
 a cow. I was so successful in this boyish frolic that 
 the universal cry of the galleries was " encore the cow" 
 In the pride of my heart I attempted imitations of 
 other animals, but with very inferior effect.' Blair's 
 advice was, says Scott, ' Stick to the coo, man/ in 
 his peculiar burr, but we can imagine how this un- 
 foreseen reminiscence must have confused the divine. 
 After an ineffectual effort to enter himself at the 
 Inner Temple, the 'cub' had to return in April 1761 
 to Edinburgh. 
 
 Old Edinburgh was nothing if not convivial. Writing 
 to Temple and confessing that his London life had 
 * not been entirely as it ought to be,' he appeals to him 
 for pity in his present surroundings. Imagine 'a young 
 fellow,' he cries, 'whose happiness was always centred 
 in London, hauled away to the town of Edinburgh, 
 obliged to conform to every Scottish custom, or be 
 laughed at " Will ye hae some jeel ? Oh fie, oh fie ! " 
 his flighty imagination quite cramped, and be obliged 
 to study Corpus Juris Civilis and live in his father's 
 
24 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 strict family ; is there any wonder, sir, that the unlucky 
 dog should be somewhat fretful ? Yoke a Newmarket 
 courser to a dung cart, and I '11 lay my life on't he'll 
 either caper or kick most confoundedly, or be as stupid 
 and restive as an old battered post-horse.' Among the 
 many clubs of the time Boswell instituted a jovial society 
 called the Soaping Club which met weekly in a tavern. 
 The motto of the members was 'Every man soap his 
 own beard,' a rather recondite witticism which their 
 founder declares equivalent to the reigning phrase of 
 ' Every man in his humour.' It may be suggested 
 here that in this company of feeble Bacchanalians 
 Boswell had copied the Rabelaisian fay ce que vous 
 voudras of the Franciscans of Medmenham Abbey 
 with Sandwich, Wilkes, and others. At any rate, as 
 their self-constituted laureate, he produced the following 
 extraordinary song, which can be paralleled for inanity 
 only by the stave he sang before Pitt in the Guildhall 
 of London, as a means of attracting the notice of the 
 Premier with a view to Parliament. The song is 
 characteristically Boswellian. 
 
 ' Boswell of Soapers the King 
 
 On Tuesdays at Tom's does appear, 
 And when he does talk or does sing, 
 
 To him ne'er a one can come near. 
 For he talks with such ease and such grace, 
 
 That all charm'd to attention we sit, 
 And he sings with so comic a face 
 
 That our sides are just ready to split. 
 
 Boswell is modest enough, 
 
 Himself not quite Phcebus he thinks, 
 He never does flourish with snuft, 
 
 And hock is the liquor he drinks. 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 25 
 
 And he owns that Ned Colquet the priest 
 May to something of honour pretend, 
 
 And he swears that he is not in jest, 
 When he calls this same Colquet his friend. 
 
 Boswell is pleasant and gay, 
 
 For frolic by nature designed ; 
 He heedlessly rattles away 
 
 When the company is to his mind. 
 " This maxim," he says, " you may see, 
 
 We never can have corn without chaff ; " 
 So not a bent sixpence cares he, 
 
 Whether with him or at him you laugh. 
 
 Boswell does women adore, 
 
 And never once means to deceive, 
 He's in love with at least half a score ; 
 
 If they're serious he smiles in his sleeve. 
 He has all the bright fancy of youth, 
 
 With the judgment of forty and five ; 
 In short, to declare the plain truth, 
 
 There is no better fellow alive.' 
 
 This, it must be confessed, is sad stuff even for a 
 laureate of twenty, and is jesting with difficulty. Every 
 man, says Johnson, has at one time or other of his life 
 an ambition to set up for a wag, but that a man who 
 had completed the Life of Johnson should in after years 
 complacently refer to this character of himself and 
 ' traits in it which time has not yet altered, that egotism 
 and self-applause which he is still displaying, yet it 
 would seem with a conscious smile,' is scarcely credible 
 were it not out-distanced by graver weaknesses. 
 
 For about this date he published An Elegy upon the 
 Death of an Amiable Young Lady, flanked by three 
 puffing epistles from himself and his friends, Erskine 
 and Dempster. In the same year appeared his Ode to 
 Tragedy by a Gentleman of Scotland, with a dedica- 
 
26 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 tion to James Boswell, Esq ! ' for your particular 
 kindness to me, and chiefly for the profound respect 
 with which you have always treated me.' We hear of 
 his 'old hock' humour, a favourite phrase with him 
 for his Bacchanalian tastes, and we find the author 
 limning himself as possessing 
 
 1 A soul by nature formed to feel 
 Grief sharper than the tyrant's steel, 
 And bosom big with swelling thought 
 From ancient lore's remembrance brought.' 
 
 In 1760 had appeared a Collection of Original Poems, 
 published by Donaldson in Edinburgh on the model 
 of Dodsley's Miscellanies. It comprised poems by 
 Blacklock, Beattie, and others, and a second volume 
 was issued by Erskine as editor in 1762. To it 
 Boswell contributed nearly thirty pieces along with 
 Home, the author of Douglas, Macpherson of Ossian 
 fame or notoriety, John Maclaurin and others. The 
 merits of the volume are beneath notice, and BoswelPs 
 contributions of Odes, Epigrams, Letters, Epistles, are 
 of the traditional character; but An Epistle from a 
 London Buck to his Friend must have been read by 
 his father with regret, and by his mother of * almost 
 unexampled piety and goodness' with shame. There 
 is only one poem that calls for attention, the Evening 
 Walk in the Abbey Church of Holyrood House, the 
 original, perhaps, of Fergusson's lament on the state of 
 neglect of the then deserted mansion of royalty, where 
 
 ' the thistle springs 
 In domicile of ancient Kings, 
 Without a patriot to regret 
 Our palace and our ancient state.' 
 
 A third volume was announced for publication * about 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 27 
 
 eighteen months hence/ but the public had enough of 
 this coagulated jargon as Carlyle would have styled it, 
 and critics and readers are spared the task of its con- 
 sideration. 
 
 Yet all this time he was in the enjoyment of the 
 best company that Edinburgh could afford ; he was ad- 
 mitted a member of the Select Society, and his circle 
 embraced such men as Lord Somerville, Lord Hailes, 
 Dr Blair, Kames, Robertson, Hume, Home, Jupiter 
 Carlyle and others. 'Lord Auchinleck,' he quaintly 
 adds, 'took the trouble himself to give him a regular 
 course of instruction in law, a circumstance of singular 
 benefit, and of which Mr Boswell has ever expressed a 
 strong and grateful sense.' But his sense was not such 
 as to restrain him from a mock-heroic correspondence 
 with Andrew Erskine, brother of the Earl of Kellie. 
 Erskine must have been possessed of some parts, for he 
 was the correspondent of Burns and was intimate with 
 George Thomson the composer, yet we can fancy the 
 consternation of the old judge when this farrago of the 
 new humour was published in London in 1763. Writ- 
 ing from his father's house, he thus begins : c Dear 
 Erskine, no ceremony I beseech you ! Give me your 
 hand. How is my honest Captain Andrew? How 
 
 goes it with the elegant Lady A ? the lovely, sighing 
 
 Lady J ? and how, oh how, does that glorious 
 
 luminary Lady B do? you see I retain my usual 
 
 volatility. The Boswells, you know, came over from 
 Normandy with William the Conqueror; and some of 
 us possess the spirit of our ancestors, the French. I 
 do, for one. A pleasant spirit it is. Vive la bagatelle is 
 the maxim. A light heart may bid defiance to fortune.' 
 Again the old man would find 'Allow me a few 
 more words. I live here in a remote corner of an old 
 ruinous house, where my ancestors have been very 
 
28 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 jovial. What a solemn idea rushes on my mind ! They 
 are all gone : I must follow. Well, and what then ? 
 Let me shift about to another subject. The best I can 
 think of is a sound sleep ; so good-night/ In fact, like 
 Sir Fretful Plagiary in the Critic^ Bozzy was so covetous 
 of popularity that he would rather be abused than be 
 not mentioned at all. Little augury, too, of success at 
 the bar could his father find in the following portrait of 
 his son : ' the author of the Ode to Tragedy is a most 
 excellent man ; he is of an ancient family in the west of 
 Scotland, upon which he values himself not a little. At 
 his nativity there appeared omens of his future great- 
 ness ; his parts are bright, and his education has been 
 good; he has travelled in post-chaises miles without 
 number; he is fond of seeing much of the world; he 
 eats of every good dish, especially apple pie ; he drinks 
 old hock; he has a very fine temper; he is somewhat 
 of a humourist, and a little tinctured with pride ; he has 
 a good, manly countenance, and he owns himself to 
 be amorous; he has infinite vivacity; yet is at times 
 observed to have a melancholy cast.' 
 
 Nothing but the most obtuse vanity could ever have 
 induced Bozzy to publish all this. * Curiosity/ he 
 declares in the preface, 'is the most prevalent of all 
 our passions, and the curiosity for reading letters is the 
 most prevalent of all kinds of curiosity. Had any 
 man in the three kingdoms found the following letters 
 directed, sealed, and addressed, with post-marks pro- 
 vided he could have done so honestly he would have 
 read every one of them.' There is the true Bos well in 
 this characteristic confession, the Boswell that read in 
 the private diaries of Johnson, and, with an eye to bio- 
 graphical materials, had admitted an impulse to carry 
 them off, and never see him more. 'Why, sir/ said 
 the doctor, ' I do not think you could have helped it.' 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 29 
 
 After this it was no wonder that his father was in- 
 duced to allow his return to London, * Where a man 
 may soap his own beard, and enjoy whatever is to be had 
 in this transitory state of things, and every agreeable 
 whim may be indulged without censure.' The Duke of 
 Queensbery, the patron of Gay, was one of those to 
 whom he was recommended now that he inclined to 
 'persist in his fondness for the Guards, or rather, in 
 truth, for the metropolis/ but he suspected some arrange- 
 ment between his father and the Duke by which the 
 commission was delayed. For some months he spent 
 a random life as the occupier of Temple's chambers in 
 the vicinity of Johnson. Little could be expected of 
 the friend of Churchill and Wilkes, yet Boswell now was 
 at the turning point of his career. 
 
 'This is to me,' he writes in his great work, 'a 
 memorable year ; for in it I had the happiness to 
 obtain the acquaintance of that extraordinary man whose 
 memoirs I am now writing; an acquaintance which I 
 shall ever esteem as one of the most fortunate circum- 
 stances of my life.' We have seen how Lord Hailes, 
 had on the 1758 circuit, mentioned to him the name of 
 Johnson ; how in Glasgow Gentleman had given him a 
 representation of ' dictionary Johnson ; ' how Derrick in 
 1760, during his first visit to London, had promised to 
 introduce this youth of twenty to the great dictator of 
 literature; and Sheridan, the father of the dramatist, 
 when in Edinburgh in 1761, giving public lectures 
 on elocution, had made a similar promise. But on 
 his return to London at the end of 1762, Boswell had 
 found that Sheridan had quarrelled with Johnson, and 
 Derrick had retired to Bath as master of the ceremonies 
 in succession to Beau Nash. Luckily Derrick had 
 before introduced his friend to Davies, the bookseller 
 in Covent Garden, who as c one of the best imitators of 
 
30 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Johnson's voice and manner ' only increased the ardour 
 of Boswell for the meeting. Now the hour was come 
 and the man. Yet surely never could there have been 
 a more apparently unpropitious time chosen. Number 
 45 of the North Briton denouncing Bute and his Scotch 
 favourites had appeared on April 23rd. The minister 
 had bowed to the storm and resigned, while the writer 
 of the libel had been arrested under a general warrant 
 and discharged on the 3oth of the month under appeal, 
 either to be hanged, thought Adam Smith, or to get 
 Bute impeached in six months. Alexander Cruden, of 
 Concordance fame, was rambling over London in his 
 lucid interval like an inverted Old Mortality, busy with 
 a sponge obliterating every hated c 45 ' scrawled over 
 the walls and every conceivable spot in the city against 
 his country. Yet at such an hour it was that the 
 famous meeting of Johnson and his biographer took 
 place. 
 
 'At last, on Monday the i6th of May, when I was 
 sitting in Mr Davies' back-parlour, after having drunk 
 tea with him and Mrs Davies, Johnson unexpectedly 
 came into the shop ; and Mr Davies having perceived 
 him through the glass door in the room in which we 
 were sitting, advancing towards us, he announced his 
 awful approach to me, somewhat in the manner of an 
 actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet 
 on the appearance of his father's ghost, " Look, my lord, 
 it comes." I found that I had a very perfect idea of 
 Johnson's figure, from the portrait of him painted by Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds. . . . Mr Davies mentioned my name, 
 and respectfully introduced me to him. I was much 
 agitated; and recollecting his prejudice against the 
 Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, 
 "Don't tell where I come from." "From Scotland," 
 cried Davies roguishly. " Mr Johnson," said I, " I do 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 31 
 
 indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." . . . 
 " That, sir, I find is what a very great many of your 
 countrymen cannot help." This stroke stunned me a 
 good deal; and when we had sat down, I felt myself 
 not a little embarrassed, and apprehensive of what might 
 come next. . . . Eager to take any opening to get 
 into conversation with him, I ventured to say, " Oh, sir, 
 I cannot think Mr Garrick would grudge such a trifle 
 to you." "Sir," said he, with a stern look, "I have 
 known David Garrick longer than you have done, and 
 I know no right you have to talk to me on the subject." 
 Perhaps I deserved this check/ etc., etc. 
 
 Next day Boswell called on Davies, who assured him 
 that the doctor would not take it amiss if he were to 
 visit him ; and so, a week later, ' after being entertained 
 by the witty sallies of Messieurs Thornton, Wilkes, 
 Churchill and Lloyd/ from whom he would hear 
 plenty of vigorous abuse of his country, and whose 
 names we may take it as certain were not mentioned 
 to his new friend, Boswell boldly repaired to Johnson. 
 Nothing is more striking than the contrast between 
 the hitherto reckless Bozzy and the easy assurance 
 and composure with which he faces Johnson, sits up 
 with the sage, sups at the Mitre, leads the conversa- 
 tion, and apparently holds his own in the discussions. 
 Doubtless, the ' facility of manners ' which Adam 
 Smith has said was a feature of the man, was here 
 of service to him, and no less so would have been the 
 flattering way in which he managed to inform Johnson 
 of his reputation over the Border. Boswell was not 
 slow to write to Lord Hailes, knowing full well how 
 the report of such an acquaintance and friendship would 
 be welcome at Auchinleck as the signs of an approach- 
 ing reformation. Goldsmith, whom he met shortly after, 
 he entertained at the Mitre with a party of friends, 
 
32 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 among whom was the Rev. Dr John Ogilvie, the author 
 of some portentous and completely forgotten epics, but 
 who is not yet quite lost to sight as the writer of the 
 sixty-second paraphrase of Scripture, ' Lo ! in the last 
 of days behold.' A subsequent 'evening by ourselves ' 
 he describes to Lord Hailes in the wariest' manner, so 
 as to secure his father's consent to a plan of travel. 
 The old judge had wished his son to follow the pro- 
 fession of law which had now in their family become 
 quite hereditary, and had coupled this with a scheme 
 of study at Utrecht, after the plan he had himself 
 followed at Leyden. A compromise had, in fact, been 
 arranged by which this was to be pursued, and the 
 career of arms dropped. Nothing can be more adroit 
 than the way in which the young hopeful about to 
 embark on the grand tour manages in his despatch 
 to his lordship, with an eye to the Home Office, to 
 suggest the furtherance of his own ideas under the 
 supposed guise of Johnson's approval. ' He advises 
 me to combat idleness as a distemper, to read five 
 hours every day, but to let inclination direct me what 
 to read. He is a great enemy to a stated plan of study. 
 He advises me when abroad to go to places where there 
 is most to be seen and learned. He is not very fond 
 of the notion of spending a whole winter in a Dutch 
 town. He thinks I may do much more by private 
 study than by attending lectures. He would have me 
 to perambulate (a word in his own style) Spain, also 
 to visit the northern kingdoms, where more that is 
 new is to be seen than in France or Italy, but he is not 
 against me seeing these warmer regions.' 
 
 Here, in fact, is the germ of the tour to the Baltic 
 they had hoped when at Dunvegan one day to carry out, 
 for which Johnson, when in his sixty-eighth year was 
 still ready, and which Boswell thought would have 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 33 
 
 made them acquainted with the King of Sweden, and 
 the Empress of Russia. On a later day of the month 
 he asked his friend to the Mitre to meet his uncle Dr 
 John, ' an elegant scholar and a physician bred in the 
 School of Boerhaave,' and George Dempster, M.P. for 
 the Forfar Burghs. As the latter was infected with 
 the sceptical views of Hume, there would seem to have 
 been a scene, for in the Life Johnson is made to say, 
 1 1 have not met with any man for a long time who has 
 given me such general displeasure/ but Boswell, ever 
 with an eye for copy, writes to Temple, 'it was a 
 very fertile evening, and my journal is stored with its 
 fruits.' Then to Lord Hailes he writes : 'Entre nous 
 of Dempster, Johnson had seen a pupil of Hume 
 and Rousseau totally unsettled as to principles. I 
 had infinite satisfaction in hearing solid truth confuting 
 vain subtilty. I thank God that I have got acquainted 
 with Mr Johnson. He has done me infinite service. 
 He has assisted me to obtain peace of mind ; he has 
 assisted me to become a rational Christian ; I hope I 
 shall ever remain so.' Pleasantly all this would sound 
 at home. There would be less now heard of his father's 
 threat in May to disinherit him, and of the son's appeal 
 to Lord Hailes to intercede with him * to have patience 
 with me for a year or two, and I may be what he pleases.' 
 On July 1 5th he has had a long letter from his father, 
 full of affection and good counsel. ' Honest man,' he 
 \\rites to Temple, 'he is now happy. He insists on 
 having my solemn promise. The only question is, how 
 much I am to promise.' Then on the 25th he has his 
 letters of credit and his introductions to people in 
 Holland. ' They have been sent open for me to seal, 
 so I have been amused to see the different modes of 
 treating that favourite subject myself. ' He is to be 
 allowed ^240 a year, but he is determined not to be 
 
 c 
 
34 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 straitened, nor to encourage the least narrowness, but 
 to draw on his father when necessary. Wilkes had 
 gone to France, but had let him have some franks ' to 
 astonish a few North Britons.' Parting for a time 
 with Temple, whose family was now in straitened 
 circumstances, he assures him that their friendship should 
 be 'an exalted comfort' to him in his distress, and 
 concludes characteristically enough with advice to 
 Temple's younger brother in the army for his establish- 
 ment in * solid notions of religion and morality.' 
 
 Before he bids his native land good-night, there is a 
 final letter to Hailes with his father, Jortin, and the 
 actress all well in his mind's eye. 'My scepticism,' 
 he says, ' was not owing to thinking wrong, but to not 
 thinking at all. It is a matter of great moment to keep 
 a sense of religion constantly impressed upon our minds. 
 If that divine guest does not occupy part of the space, 
 vain intruders will," the fine old roll of Micawber to 
 the close. Johnson on the 5th August started with him 
 for Harwich in the stage coach, half in hopes of visiting 
 Holland in the summer, and accompanying Bozzy in a 
 tour through the Netherlands. * I must see thee out 
 of England,' said the old man kindly. On the beach 
 they parted, and 'as the vessel put out to sea, I kept 
 my eyes upon him for a considerable time, while he 
 remained rolling his majestic frame in his usual manner; 
 and at last I perceived him walk back into the town 
 and he disappeared.' Boswell's attendance upon his new 
 friend had not escaped the notice of the doctor's circle. 
 'Who,' asked one, 'is this Scotch cur at Johnson's 
 heels?' 'Not a cur, but a bur,' was Goldsmith's 
 reply, ' and he has the faculty of sticking.' With what 
 effect the world was to know. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE CONTINENT CORSICA. 1763-66 
 
 'That's from Paoli of Corsica. ' GOLDSMITH, ' The Good 
 Natured Man* 
 
 1 UTRECHT/ writes Boswell, ' seeming at first very dull 
 to me after the animated scenes of London, my spirits 
 were grievously affected.' But the depression was not 
 destined to last, and soon we hear of his having wearied 
 of the proposed two years' course of study. The 
 custom of legal training in some of the universities of 
 the Continent was about this time coming to a close, 
 though for long it had remained usual, at least with the 
 landed classes of Scotland, to secure such an extended 
 field of study for the bar by an attendance at some of 
 the more developed schools of jurisprudence in Hol- 
 land. Cunningham, the celebrated critic of Bentley, 
 had given prelections in Leyden, and no reader of the 
 Heart of Midlothian will forget the laments of the 
 inimitable Bartoline Saddletree over his not being sent 
 to Leyden or Utrecht to study the Institutes and the 
 Pandects. Since the days of Gilbert Jack at Leyden, 
 the connection between Holland and the Scottish 
 universities had been close, and the garrets of Amster- 
 dam had been crowded before the Revolution by 
 refugees from both Scotland and England who main- 
 tained, upon their return, the ties they had contracted 
 
 35 
 
36 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 in their exile. Even Fielding had been sent to Leyden 
 for law, and just before the visit of Boswell, to which 
 his father had consented rather as a compromise than 
 from any practical benefit that might ensue, the law of 
 Scotland, largely based on Roman and feudal prece- 
 dents, had received fresh extensions of conveyancing 
 and other branches of jurisprudence, through the mass 
 of forfeited estates brought into the market after the 
 suppression of the Jacobite Rebellions. What country, 
 then, could so rapidly afford such a course of legal 
 study as the Protestant and commercial Holland ? The 
 reputation of Boerhaave had drawn medical students 
 from all quarters, and JBoswelPs uncle John, and the cele- 
 brated Monro primus of the Edinburgh Medical School 
 had been among the number. Goldsmith in 1755 
 met Irish medical students there, and some twenty 
 years before the time we have reached Carlyle of 
 Inveresk had found in Leyden ' an established lodging- 
 house ' where his countrymen, Gregory and Dickson 
 were domiciled, and numerous others, among whom he 
 expressly mentions Charles Townshend, Askew the 
 Greek scholar, Johnston of Westerhall, Doddeswell, after- 
 wards Chancellor of the Exchequer, and John Wilkes then 
 entering, at eighteen, on the career of profligacy that 
 was to render him notorious. Carlyle describes their 
 meetings at each other's rooms twice or thrice a week, 
 when they drank coffee, supped on Dutch red herrings, 
 eggs and salad, and never sat beyond the decent hour of 
 twelve. For such a style of living Boswell's annual 
 allowance of 240 was certainly handsome in a place 
 where the fuel, chiefly peat, was the only expensive 
 item. 
 
 But such a quiet style of life was not congenial to 
 the lively tastes of our traveller. He soon tired of the 
 civil law lectures of Professor Trotz, and longed for 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 37 
 
 fresh woods and pastures new. He sighed to be upon 
 his travels again. Of his life abroad some isolated 
 notes may be gathered from the Boswelliana, and, as 
 has been mentioned, he sought out his relatives at the 
 Hague ' of the first fashion/ the Sommelsdycks, and 
 with his facility of manners, and his father's credentials 
 to the literati and scholars of the place, his circle of 
 acquaintance was large and influential. We hear of an 
 intimacy with the Rev. William Brown, minister of the 
 Scottish congregation at Utrecht, the father of Principal 
 Laurence Brown of Marischal College, Aberdeen; and 
 with Sir Joseph Yorke, whom he met later in Ireland, 
 then the Ambassador at the Hague, he would appear to 
 have been acquainted. But Sir Joseph does not seem 
 to have welcomed the easy manners of his young friend, 
 and the dull life of the burgomasters was little suited 
 to Boswell who ridicules their portly figures and their 
 clothes which they wore as if they had been ' luggage.' 
 
 The two years' course of study was abruptly reduced 
 to one. At its close we trace him at Berlin in July 
 1764, and in close relations with the British Envoy at 
 the Prussian Court. Fortunately for Boswell this was 
 both a countryman and a friend of his father's, Sir 
 Andrew Mitchell, the late M.P. for the Banff Burghs. 
 By the Ambassador he was introduced to the best 
 society in the capital, and from Berlin he wrote to his 
 father representing the urgent necessity of extending his 
 travels, and, till the letter in reply should arrive, he pro- 
 ceeded into Hanover and Brunswick. On his return to 
 Berlin towards the end of August he found a letter 
 waiting him from Lord Auchinleck, who was naturally 
 chagrined at the breakdown of his scheme of com- 
 promise. A visit to Paris he was prepared to allow, but 
 the return of the wanderer to Utrecht was peremptorily 
 commanded. The family of the Envoy was now at Spa, 
 
38 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 but next day Boswell wrote him a letter urging him to 
 intercede with his father for the proposed extension. 
 The letter is a very long one, and its abridgement even 
 is impossible here, but few more Boswellian productions 
 can be found. He has, he tells Sir Andrew, a melancholy 
 disposition, and to escape from the gloom of dark 
 speculation he has made excursions into the fields of 
 folly, and in this tone of the Preacher in Ecclesiastes he 
 rambles on. The words of St Paul, ' I must see Rome,' 
 he finds are borne in upon him, and such a journey 
 would afford him the talk for a lifetime, the more so that 
 he was no libertine and disclaimed all intentions of 
 travelling as Milord Anglois, but simply as the scholar 
 and the man of elegant curiosity. Did not Sir Andrew 
 as the loved and respected friend of his father think that 
 the son had a claim to protest before he considered any 
 act regarding himself as passed, and would not the Envoy 
 remonstrate or persuade the father as to the justice of 
 his wish? No reply was sent to this, but the judge, 
 thinking that discretion was the wiser part in circum- 
 stances where it was useless to dictate without the means 
 to enforce compliance, yielded reluctant consent to the 
 scheme of an Italian tour. Gravely then does Bozzy 
 rebuke Sir Andrew and for this occasion he forgives 
 him, 'for I just say the same to young people when I 
 advise. Believe me,' he somewhat irrelevantly adds, 
 1 I have a soul.' 
 
 Fortune followed him wherever he turned. George, 
 tenth Earl Marischal, and brother of Frederick the 
 Great's general, Marshal Keith, had joined the Earl of 
 Mar in the rising of 1715, and had made an ineffectual 
 descent in 1719 on Glenshiel with the Spaniards. But 
 in the '45 he had taken no part, and he revealed to the 
 British Government the existence of the Bourbon Family 
 Compact. In return, his attainder had been removed 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 39 
 
 by George II., and on his brief visit to Scotland he had 
 lived with Boswell's father in Ayrshire, perhaps as a friend 
 of the Commissioners for the forfeited estates, when the 
 occasion had been seized by Macpherson for an ode, 
 4 attempted after the manner of Pindar/ in the fustian 
 style of the translator of Ossian. With him or by his 
 credentials Boswell went the round of the German 
 courts, passing by Mannheim and Geneva, reaching the 
 latter towards the end of December. The reader is 
 struck with the airy assurance and self-possession which 
 the laureate of the Soapers and the Newmarket Cub 
 manifests on the grand tour, conducting himself at 
 three and twenty with complete success at the courts 
 of German princes, conversing with plenipotentiaries and 
 dignitaries of all sorts in French and Italian, for German 
 had not yet risen into sufficient historical or diplomatic 
 importance to add to the linguistic burdens of mankind. 
 Lord Marischal as the governor of Neufchatel had acted 
 as the protector of Rousseau, and so was able to furnish 
 his companion with a letter of introduction, hinting at 
 his enthusiastic nature and describing him to the 
 philosopher as a visionary hypochondriac. Voltaire he 
 interviewed at Ferney, and he managed to please the 
 great man by repeating a characteristic trait of Bozzy, 
 who believed such tale-bearing to be vastly conducive 
 to the practice of benevolence Johnson's criticism upon 
 Frederick the Great's writings, ' such as you may sup- 
 pose Voltaire's foot-boy to do, who has been his amanu- 
 ensis.' He broached the subject of the philosophy of 
 the unconscious, and was eager to know how ideas for- 
 gotten at the time were yet later on recollected. The 
 other replied by a quotation from Thomson's Winter 
 with the writer's question, as to the winds, 
 ' In what far distant region of the sky 
 Hushed in silence sleep ye when 'tis calm ? ' 
 
40 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 The attempt to draw out Voltaire upon the tour to the 
 Hebrides, which Boswell and Johnson had been vaguely 
 talking over, produced only the rather sarcastic query if 
 he wished him to accompany them, with a look * as if I 
 had talked of going to the North Pole/ Of his visit to 
 the wild philosopher, as he styles Rousseau, we have no 
 notice, beyond the general remark that they had agreed 
 to differ alike in politics and religion, but that there were 
 points oil nos times sont unies. The feudal dogmas of 
 Boswell and his rigid adherence to his pet idea of 'the 
 grand scheme of subordination ' were of course not likely 
 to be pleasing to the sceptical aqua fortis of the sombre 
 Genevese, with his belief in the fraternity of mankind 
 and the greatness of the untutored Indian. 
 
 Boswell crossed the Alps, and either then or upon 
 his homeward journey visited Bologna, Venice, and 
 Mantua. He passed through Rome and, unknown to 
 either, may have met Gibbon in the Eternal City into 
 whose mind, some weeks before, 'as I sat musing 
 among the ruins of the Capitol while the bare-footed 
 friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter/ 
 had started the idea of writing the Decline and Fall. 
 In the city he met Andrew Lumsden, the Secretary of 
 Prince Charles Edward, but we are not informed if the 
 young Jacobite of five, who had prayed for the exiled 
 family now sought any opportunity of making himself 
 known to the object of his devotion. Naples brought 
 him into the more congenial society of Wilkes with 
 whom, he says, he ' enjoyed many classical scenes with 
 peculiar relish/ When Churchill had died at Boulogne 
 in the arms of Wilkes, the latter had retired to Naples 
 to inscribe his sorrow ' in the close style of the ancients* 
 upon an urn of alabaster which had been the gift of 
 Winckelmann, and in that city now he was, as the 
 literary executor, preparing annotations on the works of 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 41 
 
 Churchill. Boswell managed with his curious want of 
 tact in such matters, fitting the man who could suggest 
 cards to a dying friend with an uneasy conscience, to 
 hint that the poet had ' bounced into the regions below/ 
 and to render the // Bruto Inglese, by which the papers 
 of the land referred to Wilkes and liberty, by a version 
 significant of the notorious ugliness of his gay acquaint- 
 ance. Naples, as with Milton, was the limit of his tour, 
 and from it he returned to Rome. He reached that 
 city in April 1765, and dispatched a letter to Rousseau, 
 then ' living in romantick retirement ' in Switzerland, 
 requesting his promised introduction to the Corsican 
 general, 'which if he refused, I should certainly go 
 without it, and probably be hanged as a spy. 1 The 
 wild philosopher was as good as his word, and the letter 
 met the traveller at Florence. * The charms of sweet 
 Siena detained me no longer than they should have 
 done, I required the hardy air of Corsica to brace me, 
 after the delights of Tuscany/ an enigmatical turn of 
 expression upon which light is thrown later, when we 
 discuss the love affairs of Boswell, by a reference to a 
 dark-eyed ' signora ' on whom the tender traveller had 
 glanced. At Leghorn he was within one day's sail of 
 Corsica. 
 
 Pascal Paoli was the Garibaldi of his day. When 
 his father in 1738 had been driven from the island by 
 the French, he had retired with him to Naples where 
 he entered a military college and followed the profession 
 of arms. The way was paved for his return by the 
 disturbances in the island in 1755, and so successful 
 was he in his guerilla warfare as general against the 
 Genoese, the owners of Corsica, that they were speedily 
 driven to sue for peace. It was in a sort of lull in the 
 storm of hostilities that our traveller made his unexpected 
 appearance, and the adroit way in which he managed to 
 
42 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 lay his plans of action and to carry them out with such 
 complete success calls for our admiration. In his Tour 
 he simply says that * having resolved to pass some years 
 abroad (this is excellent, after his letter to Sir Andrew) 
 for my instruction and entertainment, I conceived a 
 design of visiting the Island of Corsica. I wished for 
 something more than just the common course of what 
 is called the tour of Europe, and Corsica occurred to 
 me as a place where nobody else had been.' It may 
 have been suggested to him by Rousseau, who had 
 been engaged in some vague scheme of philandering 
 philanthropy by which the wild philosopher was to play 
 the Solon and the Lycurgus of the distressed islanders, 
 and establish a fresh code of laws upon the basis of his 
 new fraternity, but with which 'this steady patriot of 
 the world alone/ as Canning styles him, 'the friend 
 of every country but his own,' managed to mix in a 
 much more practical way some not very honourable, if 
 characteristic, intrigues for the surrender of the island 
 to France. 
 
 Bozzy, at all events, was determined to make a bold 
 bid for fame. Nothing like this had occurred, as an 
 opening, during all his tour. The dangers of the plan 
 were fully known to him, and the possibility was laid 
 before his eyes of capture at the hands of the Barbary 
 corsairs and a term of imprisonment at Algiers. Our 
 adventurer waited on the commodore in command of 
 the British squadron in the bay of Leghorn, and he 
 was provided with a passport, the value of which 
 against the threatened dangers does not sufficiently 
 appear. Before he left Leghorn, his proposed visit 
 had come to be regarded in a very serious light by 
 Italian politicians. They saw in him an envoy from 
 the British intrusted with powers to negotiate a treaty 
 with Corsica, and all disclaimers of any such intention 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 43 
 
 were politely treated as an evasion. Bozzy was in 
 consequence viewed as ' a very close young man/ 
 a trait that at no time of his life was ever applicable 
 to James Boswell, on whom, indeed, the advice given 
 by Sir Henry Wotton to Milton would have been 
 thrown away. Putting out to sea in a Tuscan vessel 
 bound for Capo Corso for wine, he had two days to 
 spend on board in consequence of a dead calm. ' At 
 sunset/ he says, * all the people in the ship sang Ave 
 Maria with great devotion and some melody.' One 
 recalls the similar circumstances under which Cardinal 
 Newman found himself becalmed on the orange-boat 
 in the Straits of Bonifacio. For some hours he had 
 put himself in spirits by taking a hand at the oar, and 
 at seven in the evening of the second day they landed 
 in the harbour of Centuri. He delivered his credentials, 
 and on Sunday heard a Corsican sermon, where the 
 preacher told of Catharine of Siena who wished to be 
 laid in the mouth of the awful pit, that she might stop 
 it up, and so prevent the falling in of more souls. 
 ' I confess, my brethren/ cried the friar, * I have not 
 such zeal, but I do what I can, I warn you how to 
 avoid it.' 
 
 At Corte, the capital of the island, he waited boldly 
 upon the Supreme Council. He was gravely received, 
 as befitted a supposed British envoy, and lodged in 
 the apartment of Paoli in a Franciscan convent. Next 
 day, the old petitioner for a commission in the Guards 
 found the first and last military experience of his life. 
 Three French deserters waited on him in the belief 
 that he came to recruit soldiers for Scotland, and 
 ' begged to have the honour of going along with me.' 
 Nor was the idea so absurd as he seems to have viewed 
 it, for from the Scots Magazine of a somewhat later 
 date we learn that British Volunteers and Highlanders 
 
44 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 disbanded after the wars had been enlisted in the 
 service of Paoli. But it is not improbable that the 
 deserters had heard of Boswell's nationality from the 
 woman of Penrith whom he found in the island, 
 married to a French soldier in the army of the 
 Pretender, whose fortunes she had followed when they 
 had passed through Carlisle on the retreat from Derby. 
 Another feature of Boswell, one whose consideration 
 and explanation we shall attempt later on, now for 
 the first time meets us, his inveterate love for in- 
 terviewing criminals, and accordingly, 'as I wished 
 to see all things in Corsica/ he had a meeting with 
 the hangman who seemed sensible of his situation. 
 The inhabitants crowded round him at a village as 
 he advanced, and questioned the traveller, as Coleridge 
 at Valetta found himself similarly interrogated, as to 
 his professing himself a Christian when he did not 
 believe in the Pope e perche, and why ? The old 
 candidate for the priesthood managed to deftly evade 
 this query by an assurance that in Britain the people 
 were too far off and in a theological climate of their 
 own. He was in the highest humour, and in this 
 unusual flow of spirits he harangued the men of 
 Bastelica with great fluency, getting, however, at 
 Sollacaro somewhat nervous as the interview with the 
 Corsican leader drew nigh. Paoli lived in constant 
 dread of assassination, and the sudden arrival of this 
 mysterious stranger was strongly calculated to arouse 
 suspicions. For ten minutes, in silence, he looked at 
 Boswell, who broke in with the remark that he was 
 a gentleman from Scotland upon his travels and had 
 lately visited Rome from which, having seen the ruins 
 of one brave people, he was now come to view the rise 
 of another. The general was not quite set at ease by 
 this sententiously balanced sentence, and years after he 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 \ 
 
 JAMES 
 
 told Miss Burney about his impressions at the time of 
 the mysterious stranger. It shews the ruling passion 
 strong in life, and that Bos well, as ' the chiel' amang 
 them takin' notes,' forgot the rules of ordinary courtesy 
 and prudence in the gratification of his darling method. 
 ' He came to my country sudden,' said Paoli in his 
 broken English, 'and he fetched me some letters of 
 recommending him. And I supposed, in my mente he 
 was in the privacy one espy ; for I look away from him 
 to my other companies, and when I look back to him 
 I behold it in his hands his tablet, and one pencil. O, 
 he was at the work, I give it you my honour, of writing 
 down all what I say to some persons whatsoever in the 
 room. I was angry enough, pretty much so. But 
 soon I found out I was myself the monster he came 
 to observe. O, he is a very good man Mr Boswell at 
 the bottom, so witty, cheerful, so talkable. But at the 
 first, Oh I was indeed fache of the sufficient.' This 
 first glimpse of Bozzy at work is delightful. He was 
 in fact "making himself," all unknown the while, as 
 Shortreed said of Scott over the Liddesdale raids. 
 
 He dined with the general and suite. In spite of, 
 perhaps by very reason of, his protestations of having 
 no diplomatic mission, the highest attention was shewn 
 him as an accredited envoy from St James'. In the 
 morning chocolate was served up to him on a silver 
 salver with the national arms ; he rode out on the 
 general's horse, with guards marching before him. 
 Paoli knew sufficient English to maintain the dialogue, 
 having picked up some slight knowledge of the tongue 
 from Irish refugee officers in the Neapolitan service. 
 His library was turned over by his inquisitive guest, 
 who found among the books some odd volumes of The 
 Spectator and The Tatler, Pope's Essay on Man, 
 Gulliver's Travels^ and Barclay's Apology for the 
 
46 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Quakers. His good humour, as it had won on the 
 general, endeared the supposed ambasciadore Inglese to 
 the peasants, and he had a Corsican dress made for 
 him. Of that dress ' in which I walked about with 
 an air of true satisfaction ' every one who has heard 
 of James Boswell has read, and it is inseparable 
 somehow from our conceptions of the man and 
 writer. 
 
 We select from this Corsican Tour the least known 
 to the general reader of BoswelPs three great works 
 what seems to us the gem of the book : ' One day 
 they must needs hear me play upon my German flute. 
 To have told my honest natural visitants, 'Really, 
 gentlemen, I play very ill,' and put on such airs as we 
 do in our genteel companies, would have been highly 
 ridiculous. I therefore immediately complied with 
 their request. I gave them one or two Italian airs, and 
 then some of our beautiful old Scots tunes, Gilderoy, 
 The Lass o' Pattis Mill, Corn Riggs are Bonny: The 
 pathetick simplicity and pastoral gaiety of the Scots 
 musick will always please those who have the genuine 
 feelings of nature. The Corsicans were charmed with 
 the specimens I gave them, though I may now say that 
 they were very indifferently performed. My good 
 friends insisted also to have an English song from me. 
 I endeavoured to please them in this, too. I sung 
 them c Hearts of Oak are our Ships, Hearts of Oak are 
 our Men.' I translated it into Italian for them, and 
 never did I see men so delighted as the Corsicans were. 
 ' Cuore di quercoj cried they, ' bravo Inglese 1 ' It 
 was quite a joyous riot. I fancied myself to be a 
 recruiting sea officer. I fancied all my chorus of 
 Corsicans aboard the British fleet.' 
 
 How admirable is the style of all this, equal quite to 
 Goldsmith's best and lightest touch ! Exquisite, too, is 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 47 
 
 that picture of Bozzy, as the rollicking British stage-tar 
 of tradition, in his rendering of Garrick's song, the 
 gems from the Opera and the national melodies. 
 Allan Ramsay's song in Corsica is to be equalled 
 only by Goldsmith on his tour when he played, but 
 not for amusement, Barbara Allan and Johnny Arm- 
 strongs Good Night before the doors of Italian convents 
 and Flemish homesteads. 
 
 But the highstrung Bozzy had to experience a revul- 
 sion of low feelings to which he was ever prone. He is 
 soon in a sort of Byronic fit, and he continues in a strain 
 with which we should have not credited the * gay classic 
 friend of Jack Wilkes ' and of that Sienese signora^ unless 
 he had turned evidence against himself. He declared 
 his feelings to Paoli, as he had done to Johnson, whose 
 curt advice had been not to confuse or resolve the com- 
 mon consequences of irregularity into an unalterable 
 decree of destiny. To the general he now attributed 
 his feeling of the vanity of life, the exhaustion in the 
 very heat of youth of all the sweets of being, and the 
 incapacity for taking part in active life to his 'meta- 
 physical researches,' his reasoning beyond his depth on 
 such subjects as it is not given to man to know. These 
 hesitances the other wisely pushed aside with the 
 soldierly advice to strengthen his mind by the perusal of 
 Livy and Plutarch. In return Bozzy gave an imitation of 
 ' my revered friend Mr Samuel Johnson/ little dreaming 
 that all three would one day be intimate in London, 
 and the general's house in Portman Square be always at 
 the traveller's disposal. From the palace, as he styles 
 it, of Paoli, Nov. 1765 he wrote to Johnson, as he had 
 done before, * from a kind of superstition agreeable to 
 him as to myself,' from what he calls loca solennia 
 places of solemn interest. ' I dare to call this a spirited 
 tour. I dare to challenge your approbation ; ' and, 
 
48 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 reading it twenty years later in the original which the 
 old man had preserved, he found it full of ' generous 
 enthusiasm.' No account of the continental travels of 
 Boswell would be complete without the reproduction of 
 his letter to the doctor from Wittenberg. It is one of 
 the most important for the more subtle shades of 
 psychology in the writer's character. 
 
 ' Sunday ', Sept. 30, 1764. 
 MY EVER DEAR AND MUCH RESPECTED SlR, YOU 
 
 know my solemn enthusiasm of mind. You love me 
 for it, and I respect myself for it, because in so far I 
 resemble Mr Johnson. You will be agreeably surprized 
 when you learn the reason of my writing this letter. I 
 am at Wittenberg in Saxony. I am in the old church 
 where the Reformation was first preached, and where 
 some of the Reformers lie interred. I cannot resist the 
 serious pleasure of writing to Mr Johnson from the tomb 
 of Melancthon. My paper rests upon the gravestone of 
 that great and good man who was undoubtedly the best 
 of all the Reformers. ... At this tomb, then, my ever 
 dear and respected friend ! I vow to thee an eternal 
 attachment It shall be my study to do what I can to 
 render your life happy : and if you die before me, I shall 
 endeavour to do honour to your memory and, elevated 
 by the remembrance of you, persist in noble piety. May 
 God, the father of all beings, ever bless you ! and may 
 you continue to love your most affectionate friend, and 
 devoted servant, JAMES BOSWELL.' 
 
 So early had Boswell made his resolve to be the 
 biographer of Johnson. On the very day of his 
 introduction to him, he had taken notes of all that 
 had passed in Davies' back-parlour. He was none of 
 the men that do things by halves, and blunder into 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 49 
 
 a kind of success, as some of his depreciators have 
 thought. 
 
 Six weeks he had been in Corsica. The first day of 
 December saw him land at Genoa on his return, Lyons 
 was reached on the third day of the new year, Paris one 
 week later. Here Rousseau who had preceded him to 
 London had provided him with a curious commission, 
 the bringing over into England of his mistress Therese 
 Levasseur. The easy-going Hume thus announces 
 the fact to his friend the Countess de Boufflers. 
 ' Mademoiselle sets out with a friend of mine, a young 
 gentleman, very good humoured, very agreeable, and 
 very mad. He has such a rage for literature that I 
 dread some event fatal to my friend's honour. For 
 remember the story of Terentia who was first married 
 to Cicero, then to Sallust, and at last in her old age 
 married a young nobleman, who imagined that she 
 must possess some secret which would convey to him 
 eloquence and genius/ A letter he found waiting 
 from Johnson, together with one announcing the death 
 of his mother. No more was heard about a second 
 year at Utrecht. He crossed to London, and was 
 again with his old friend, who had moved from the 
 Temple to a good house in Johnson's Court, in Fleet 
 Street. Goldsmith was no longer the obscure writer 
 whom he had left behind, but the author of the Vicar 
 of Wakefield and the Traveller. The club had been 
 founded. He was encouraged by the sage to publish 
 his account of his travels in Corsica ' you cannot 
 go to the bottom, but all that you tell us will be 
 new. 1 
 
 He dined at the Mitre as of old, and presented 
 Temple to Johnson. No word about his companion 
 across the Channel, naturally enough, reached the old 
 man's ears, but he mentioned Rousseau ; though he 
 
go FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 recognised he was now in a new moral atmosphere 
 where every attempt was resented to * unhinge or 
 weaken good principles.' On a modified defence of 
 the philosopher, whose works he professed had afforded 
 him edification, he did venture, but thinking it enough 
 to defend one at a time Boswell said nothing ' of my 
 gay friend Wilkes.' In the Paris salons of that winter 
 Wilkes, Sterne, Foote, Hume, and Rousseau, had been 
 the received lions. Hume had taken up the wild 
 philosopher whose melodramatic Armenian dress had 
 been the attraction at the houses of the leaders of 
 society, the ladies who (says Horace Walpole who was 
 there this year) ' violated all the duties of life and gave 
 very pretty suppers.' It was the day of Anglomania on 
 the Continent, when the name of Chatham was a name 
 to conjure with, and Hume was expounding deism to 
 the great ladies, ' when the footmen were in the room/ 
 adds the shocked Horace, lionizing Hume 'who is the 
 only thing they believe in implicitly; which they must 
 do, for I defy them to understand any language that 
 he speaks,' in allusion to the broad Scottish accent of 
 the philosopher. 
 
 The fantastic attire of Rousseau may have suggested 
 to Bozzy the Corsican dress in his valise, or he may 
 have construed into a command, willingly enough, the 
 hint Paoli had dropped to let them know at home how 
 affairs were going. He waited on Chatham with it, and 
 was received pompously but graciously, says the Earl of 
 Buchan who was present, for a touch of melodrama 
 was not uncongenial to the great minister, the ' Pericles 
 of Great Britain,' as the general had styled him. Bozzy 
 thanked him c for the very genteel manner in which 
 you are pleased to treat me.' In return, Chatham 
 eulogized Paoli as one of Plutarch's men, as Cardinal 
 de Retz had said of Montrose. 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 51 
 
 He saw Auchinleck in somewhat altered circum- 
 stances from those in which, four years before, he had 
 left his father's house, riding through Glasgow 'in a 
 cocked hat, a brown wig, brown coat made in the 
 court fashion, red vest, corduroy small clothes, and 
 long military-looking boots, with his servant riding a 
 most aristocratic distance behind.' He had left it 
 likely to vex the soul of his father, the laureate of 
 doggerel, threatening to be the disgrace of the family ; 
 he returned as the acquaintance, in varying degrees of 
 intimacy, of Johnson, Wilkes, Churchill, Goldsmith, the 
 Earl Marischal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Paoli, Chatham, and 
 plenipotentiaries of all kinds. A wonderful list for the 
 raw youth they had known at home; yet nowhere in 
 all his intercourse does he show the least want of self- 
 possession or easy bearing. The c facility of manners ' 
 and his good humour had carried him all through his 
 curious experiences with German courts and Italian 
 peasants. A ' spirited tour/ truly, if perhaps the 
 moral results had been greater. The nobility and 
 gentry of this country were welcomed abroad with but 
 too great avidity. Italy, the garden of Europe, Bozzy 
 declared to be the Covent Garden, and isolated passages 
 in his book shew that he could not claim, like Milton, 
 to have borne himself truly ' in all these places where 
 so many things are considered lawful/ Fox, we know, 
 did not escape the contagion of the grand tour, and 
 Boswell had been ' caught young.' 
 
 Nor will the reader find much fault in what the adverse 
 critics have unduly emphasized his interviewing or 
 forcing himself upon men. A man, as Johnson said to 
 him when seeking an interlocutor on this point, always 
 makes himself greater as he increases his knowledge. 
 When he was at Dunvegan on his northern tour, and 
 Colonel Macleod seemed to hint at this, Bozzy offers as 
 
52 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 his defence of what f has procured me much happiness ' 
 the eagerness he ever felt to share the society of men 
 distinguished by their rank or talents. If a man, he 
 adds, is praised for seeking knowledge, though mountains 
 and seas are in his way, he may be pardoned in the pur- 
 suit of the same object under difficulties as great though 
 of a different kind. And the defence will not be refused 
 him for the use he has made of the means. Wisdom 
 and literature alike are justified of their children, and the 
 masters in either are not so numerous that we can afford 
 to quarrel with them, or wrangle over their respective 
 merits. 'Sensation/ said Johnson, 'is sensation/ and 
 the pretty general feeling now is that in his department 
 Boswell is a master. 
 
 From his first setting out, he had written down every 
 night what he had noted during the day, ' throwing 
 together that I might afterwards make a selection at 
 leisure.' He was to try his 'prentice hand on his Tour 
 in Corsica before shewing his strength in his two greater 
 works. Mrs Barbauld regarded him as no ordinary 
 traveller, with 
 
 ' Working thoughts which swelled the breast 
 Of generous Boswell, when with noble aim 
 And views beyond the narrow beaten track 
 By trivial fancy trod, he turned his course 
 From polished Gallia's soft delicious vales.' 
 
 Such thoughts were perhaps really foreign to that 
 traveller, yet Dr Hill assures us that by every Corsican 
 of education the name of Boswell is known and honoured. 
 One curious circumstance is given. At Pino, when Bos- 
 well fancying himself ' in a publick house ' or inn, had 
 called for things, the hostess had said una cosa dopo 
 un altra,) signore^ 'one thing after another, sir.' This 
 has lingered as a memento of Bozzy in Corsica, and has 
 
JAMES BOS WELL 53 
 
 been found by Dr Hill to be preserved among the 
 traditions in the Tomasi family. Translations of the 
 book in Italian, Dutch, French, and German, spread 
 abroad the name of the traveller who, if like a prophet 
 without honour in his own country, has not been without 
 it elsewhere. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 EDINBURGH BAR STRATFORD JUBILEE. 1766-69 
 
 ' A clerk, foredoomed his father's soul to cross, 
 Who pens a stanza, when he should engross.' POPE. 
 
 THE return of the prodigal to Auchinleck would seem 
 at first to have been attended with some satisfaction to 
 both father and son. The father might now believe 
 that he was entitled to consideration from the son, 
 as a reward for his long-continued indulgence to the 
 traveller, who might in his turn reflect on the advan- 
 tages which he derived from such a protracted tour. 
 Accordingly, in his papers of the April of this year, we 
 find the following entry : ' My father said to me, " I 
 am much pleased with your conduct in every respect." 
 After all my anxiety while abroad, here is the most 
 perfect approbation and calm of mind. I never felt 
 such sollid (sic) happiness.' But the philosopher, who 
 with Paoli had compared his mind to a camera obscura, 
 reappears unfortunately in the next entry. ' But I find 
 I am not so happy with this approbation and this calm 
 as I expected to be. But why do I say alas ! when I 
 really look upon this life merely as a transient state ? ' 
 To this curious expression of Bos well we shall refer 
 when we discuss at the close his religious and philo- 
 sophical views, but it is distressing to find such whim- 
 sicalities colouring his sense of the old man's kindness 
 
 54 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 55 
 
 when he writes but shortly after, * I must stay at 
 Auchinleck, I have there just the kind of complaining 
 proper for me. All must complain, and I more than 
 most of my fellow-creatures.' 
 
 On the 26th July 1766 he passed advocate at the 
 bar. On putting on his gown he remarked to his 
 brother-advocates, as he says, that his natural propen- 
 sities had led him to a military life, but now that he 
 had been pressed by his father into the service he did 
 not doubt but that he should shew as good results as 
 those who had joined as volunteers. His gay friend 
 Wilkes had declared that he would be out-distanced in 
 the professional race by dull plodders and blockheads, 
 but at the outset he appears to have started with a fair 
 amount of zest. He dedicated his inaugural thesis to the 
 son of the Earl of Bute, Lord Mountstuart, with whom 
 he had travelled in Italy, and on whom he flattered 
 himself he had made some impression, the first of 
 BoswelPs many ineffectual attempts to secure place and 
 promotion, for on a seat in Parliament he had four 
 years before set his heart. A copy of the thesis was 
 sent to Johnson, who by this time had rather cooled 
 over the proposed publication by his friend of a book 
 on Corsica. 'You have no materials/ he said, * which 
 others have not or may not have. You have warmed 
 your imagination. I wish there were some cure like 
 the lover's leap for all heads of which some single idea 
 has obtained an unreasonable and irregular possession. 
 Mind your own affairs and leave the Corsicans to 
 theirs.' Touching on the faulty Latinity of the essay, 
 'Ruddiman,' added the old man, 'is dead.' On 
 entering his new career Bozzy began by vows for his 
 good conduct. These, a remnant of his old Catholic 
 days, we shall find him renewing again and again, 
 ludicrously and pathetically enough, however, as we 
 
56 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 draw to the close. Sometimes they appear with refer- 
 ence to matters with which the knowledge of the 
 unpublished parts of the letters to Temple, now in the 
 possession of an American collector, has to deal without 
 suggesting unduly to the more fastidious sense of the 
 present day the vagaries and weaknesses of their writer. 
 Johnson protested against this attempt to ' enchain his 
 volatility ' by vows. But Boswell replies that they may 
 be useful to one c of a variable judgment and irregular 
 inclinations. For my part, without affecting to be a 
 Socrates, I am sure I have a more than ordinary 
 struggle to maintain with the Evil Principle, and all 
 the methods I can devise are little enough to keep me 
 tolerably steady in the paths of rectitude/ Could the 
 doctor have read even the published correspondence 
 he would have been at no loss for a detailed com- 
 mentary on this defence. 
 
 And coming events now cast their shadow before, 
 That curious feature of BoswelPs character, the mixture 
 of religious sentiments and the Sterne vein of pietistic 
 moralizing united with laxity in practice, appears 
 strangely enough in the letter to Temple, dated in the 
 February of 1767, and sent to his friend who had just 
 been ordained to the living of Mamhead in Devon. 
 ' I view/ he writes, * the profession of a clergyman in 
 an amiable and respectable light. Don't be moved by 
 declamations against ecclesiastical history, as if that 
 could blacken the sacred order. ' He admits that 
 ecclesiastical history is not the best field for the display 
 of the virtues in that profession, but we are to judge 
 of the thousands of worthy divines who have been a 
 blessing to their parishes. He exhorts his friend to 
 labour cheerfully in the vineyard and to leave not a tare 
 in Mamhead. In Edinburgh it appears there were 
 specimens; for after this pious homily he confesses 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 57 
 
 quietly his own liaison with 'a dear infidel 1 of a 
 married woman. But the love affairs of Boswell, one of 
 the most curious and * characteristica!' (as he would 
 himself have phrased it) episodes in his life we shall 
 discuss in a connected form in the next chapter, in 
 order to secure clearness of treatment and concentration 
 of detail. 
 
 We turn, then, to his career at the bar. There can 
 be no shadow of a doubt that with proper industry, 
 backed as he was with very strong social and family 
 connections, he would have secured a lucrative pro- 
 fessional practice. In February of 1767 he is 'coming 
 into great employment ; I have this winter made sixty- 
 five guineas, which is a considerable sum for a young 
 man/ and the Boswelliana shew him in easy intercourse 
 with the best society in the Scottish capital. Belong- 
 ing as he did to the hereditary noblesse de la robe, as 
 Lockhart calls it, he was not likely, with but moderate 
 attention, to have stood like Scott, 'an hour by the 
 Tron, wi' deil ane to speir his price/ Sir Walter's 
 fee book shews for the first year a return of ^24, 33., 
 and ;57, 155. for the second. As he had years before 
 vowed to Lord Hailes that he would transcribe Erskine's 
 Institutes several times over till he had imprinted it on 
 his memory, so now he was hopeful by binding up the 
 session papers of securing a treasure of law reasoning 
 and a collection of extraordinary facts. By March he 
 had cleared eighty guineas, and was 'Surprised at my- 
 self, I speak with so much ease and boldness, and have 
 already the language of the bar so much at command. 
 I am doing nobly. I can hardly ever answer the letters 
 of my friends.' He had quarrelled with Rousseau who 
 had likewise broken with Hume, whose appointment 
 as secretary to Conway had perhaps cured him of his 
 follies over the wild philosopher. We find Boswell also 
 
58 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 designing squibs which were in the London printshops, 
 writing verses for them and ridiculing 'The Savage' of 
 his former idolatry. 
 
 Paoli had sent him a long letter of sixteen pages. 
 Chatham in his retirement at Bath, mystifying the court 
 and his colleagues, could yet find time to' send him 
 a three-paged communication. In reply, the young 
 traveller assures him that the character of the great 
 minister had * filled many of my best hours with the 
 noble admiration which a disinterested soul can enjoy 
 in the bower of philosophy.' He informs his lordship 
 that he is preparing for publication his Tour in Corsica, 
 that he has entered at the bar, and ' I begin to like it. 
 I labour hard ; and feel myself coming forward, and I 
 hope to be useful to my country. Could your Lordship 
 find time to honour me now and then with a letter ? I 
 have been told how favourably your Lordship has spoken 
 of me. To correspond with a Paoli and a Chatham is 
 enough to keep a young man ever ardent in the pursuit 
 of a virtuous fame/ In June he expected to be busier 
 than ever, during the week when his father sat as 
 Judge of the Outer House, ' for you must know that 
 the absurdity of mankind makes nineteen out of twenty 
 employ the son of the judge before whom their case is 
 heard/ an admission which only increases our regret 
 at the want of professional industry on the part of the 
 son. His addiction to the society of players only in- 
 creased the more as his practice at the bar would have 
 been thought to engross his attention. For the opening 
 of the Canongate Theatre, on gth December 1767, he 
 had been induced to write a prologue to the play of 
 The Earl of Essex with which the newly licensed 
 house started its career. Part of the opening verses, 
 as spoken by Ross, 'a very good copy, very concilia- 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 59 
 
 tory' as the Earl of Mansfield styled them, runs as 
 follows : 
 
 1 This night, lov'd Georges free enlightened age 
 Bids Royal favour shield the Scottish stage ; 
 His Royal Favour every bosom cheers ; 
 The drama now with dignity appears I 
 Hard is my fate if murmurings there be 
 Because that favour is announced by me. 
 Anxious, alarm'd, and aw'd by every frown, 
 May I entreat the candour of the Town ? 
 You see me here by no unworthy art ; 
 My all I venture where I've fix'd my heart. 
 Fondly ambitious of an honest fame, 
 My humble labours your indulgence claim. 
 I wish to hold no Right but by your choice, 
 I'll trust my patent to the Publick Voice.' 
 
 The effect of this, aided by friends properly planted in 
 different parts of the theatre, Boswell assures us was 
 instantaneous and effectual. But the plaudits given 
 would have been better in a strictly professional court, 
 and it led, we can see, to the association of Boswell 
 with but questionable society. 'The joyous crew of 
 thunderers in the galleries/ as Robert Fergusson de- 
 scribes them, the vulgar cits applying to their parched 
 lips 'thirst quenching porter/ and the notoriously 
 irregular lives of the players, all these were ties and 
 associations ill calculated to appease the just indigna- 
 tion of his father or to add to forensic reputation in 
 Edinburgh. The Scottish Themis, says Scott, speaking 
 from his own early experience of much higher literary 
 pursuits, is peculiarly jealous of any flirtation with the 
 muses on the part of those who have ranged themselves 
 under her banners, and to them the least lingering look 
 behind is fatal. Little wonder, then, that the paternal 
 anger was again roused, when ' the look behind ' on his 
 
60 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 part was coupled with the bitter remembrances of the 
 laureate of the Soapers, of the Erskine Correspondence, 
 and his own long indulgence destined at last to bear 
 such sorry fruits. 
 
 * How unaccountable it is/ he cries impatiently to 
 Temple, 'that my father and I should be so ill to- 
 gether ! He is a man of sense and a man of worth ; 
 but from some unhappy turn in his disposition he is 
 much dissatisfied with a son you know. ... To give 
 you an instance. I send you a letter I had a few 
 days ago. I have answered in my own style; I will 
 be myself! How galling it is to the friend of Paoli 
 to be treated so ! ' He confesses his father has ' that 
 Scots strength of sarcasm which is peculiar to a North 
 Briton/ and that time was when it would have de- 
 pressed him. But now he is firm, and, ' as my revered 
 friend Mr Samuel Johnson used to say/ he feels the 
 privileges of an independent human being ! To add to 
 the confusion of Lord Auchinleck his son had flung 
 himself with all his enthusiasm into the famous Douglas 
 Trial, the cause that figures so much to the confusion, 
 it is to be feared, of the general reader. Of this 
 some full account is necessary in order to explain 
 that extraordinary trial, perhaps the most protracted 
 and famous that ever came before a court, which, 
 dragging its slow length along through a longer course 
 than the Peloponnesian War, fills the shelves of legal 
 libraries with eighteen portly volumes of papers and 
 reports. In the case Boswell really held no actual 
 brief, though were we to follow the impression he gives 
 of his services we should infer he had been leading 
 counsel for the plaintiff, Douglas. ' With a labour of 
 which few are capable/ says Bozzy, many years after, 
 ' he compressed the substance of the immense volumes 
 of proofs and arguments into an octavo pamphlet/ to 
 
JAMES BOSVVELL 61 
 
 which its author believed ' we may ascribe a great share 
 of the popularity on Mr Douglas's side.' Then he 
 adds in a characteristic sentence, the meaning of which 
 can be fully appreciated only by those who have 
 followed his contributions to magazines and the press 
 of the day, ' Mr Boswell took care to keep the news- 
 papers and other publications incessantly warm with 
 various writings, both in prose and in verse, all tending 
 to touch the heart and rouse the parental and sym- 
 pathetic feelings.' 
 
 Lady Jane Douglas, sister to Archibald, Duke of 
 Douglas, had been privately married in 1746 to Colonel 
 Steuart, afterwards Sir John Steuart of Grandtully. She 
 was then in the forty-ninth year of her age, and the 
 marriage was not divulged till May 1748 to her brother 
 who had not been reconciled and had in consequence 
 suspended her allowance. At Paris, in very humble 
 lodgings, she gave birth to male twins in the house of a 
 Madame le Brun. The parents in 1749 returned to 
 Scotland where one of the children died; in 1761 the 
 Duke of Douglas had himself followed. Three claimants 
 took the field, the Duke of Hamilton as heir male of 
 line, the Earl of Selkirk as heir of provision under 
 former deeds, and Archibald Steuart or Douglas. Lady 
 Jane died in 1753, and Sir John in 1764, both on their 
 death-beds testifying to the legitimacy of their surviving 
 child. The Duke of Douglas, long prejudiced against 
 this son's claim by the machinations of the Hamiltons, 
 had revoked the deed in their favour for a settlement 
 executed in behalf of his sister's son Archibald. But 
 stories had become rife of that son being the child of 
 a Nicholas Mignon and Marie Guerin from whom he 
 had been purchased, and an action to reduce service on 
 a plea of partus suppositio was instituted by the tutors 
 of the Duke of Hamilton who was then a minor. 
 
62 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 In France negociations were conducted, investigations 
 made, and witnesses examined by Burnet of Monboddo, 
 Gardenstone, Hailes, and Eskgrove, and at last in July 
 1767 the Court of Session issued its decision. Lord 
 Dundas, the President, speaking first, and dwelling on 
 the age of Lady Jane, childless by a former marriage, 
 the secrecy of the birth, and the intrinsic valuelessness 
 of death-bed depositions when set against pecuniary 
 interests and family pride, recorded his vote in favour 
 of the Hamiltons. Six days were subsequently taken 
 up with the speeches of the other judges, and Mon- 
 boddo, speaking last, voted for Douglas. The verdict 
 was seven on each side, and by the President's vote the 
 case in Scotland was won by the pursuers. Kames, 
 Monboddo, and Lord Auchinleck, were in favour of the 
 defender, Douglas. 
 
 The case was at once by him appealed to the House 
 of Lords. Douglas was favoured in Scotland, where for 
 years the state of interest had been such that people in 
 company used to bargain, for the maintenance of peace, 
 that no mention of this disturbing plea should be in- 
 troduced. So high did the feeling run in Edinburgh 
 that the Hamilton party had been driven from their 
 apartments in Holyrood Palace and their property 
 plundered. It was fortunate that this loophole of 
 escape to another court was opened, for before the 
 Union such a cause would have led almost to civil 
 broil where the rival interests of the factions, through 
 the ramifications of marriage and other connections, 
 extended so widely. In earlier days the strife would 
 have ended by an appeal to the sword on the cause- 
 way. All the court influence of the Hamiltons had been 
 bent, and bent in vain, to secure the exclusion from the 
 bench of Lord Monboddo, counsel for Douglas, and 
 a duel had been fought between their agent Andrew 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 63 
 
 Stuart and Thurlow the opposing advocate. The excite- 
 ment over the verdict of the Lords on Monday, February 
 27, 1769, was unprecedented. In the Autobiography 
 <?/" Jupiter Carlyle is fortunately preserved the account 
 of the scene, witnessed by the doctor himself, who had 
 been successful in gaining admission to the court, where 
 from nine in the morning till ten at night he remained, 
 hemmed in by the crowd and overcome with the oppres- 
 sive heat. Mansfield spoke over one hour, and, on his 
 appearing to faint, the Chancellor rushed out for a 
 bottle and glasses, the current of fresh air being felt by 
 the crowd as a relief. Finally the verdict of the 
 Scottish courts was reversed without a division, and 
 a verdict found in favour of Douglas. Hume was not 
 satisfied of the legitimacy of the pursuer, neither was 
 Lord Shelburne, and bribery on both sides had 
 been extensively employed, over ^100,000 having 
 been calculated to have been spent in this protracted 
 litigation. 
 
 It was on the evening of Thursday, shortly after 
 eight, that the tidings reached Edinburgh by express. 
 The city was at once illuminated, and next morning 
 Dundas on his way to the Parliament House was 
 threatened by a mob such as the town had not seen 
 since the Porteous Riot. Two troops of dragoons 
 were drafted at once on the same day into the capital. 
 As usually told, the story, which is vouched for by 
 Ramsay of Ochtertyre, is that the mob of the night 
 before had been headed by the excited Bos well, and 
 that the windows of his father's house were smashed. 
 Had such been the case, it must have been by an over- 
 sight on the part of the mob, or some petulant freak of 
 the son, for on this occasion both Boswell and his 
 father had for once been unanimous in their belief in 
 the legitimacy of Douglas. But there is no need for 
 
64 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 doubting Ramsay's assertion that Lord Auchinleck had, 
 with tears in his eyes, to implore President Dundas to 
 commit his son to the Tolbooth ! Not only had Bozzy 
 taken the field in the November of 1767 with his 
 Essence of the Douglas Cause, ' which I regretted that 
 Dr Johnson never took the trouble to study/ even 
 though * the question interested nations/ and the 
 pamphlet had produced, as its writer flattered himself, 
 considerable effect in deciding the case, but he had ven- 
 tured on a breach of professional etiquette in publishing 
 Dorando, a Spanish Tale. This brochure was ordered 
 by the Court of Session to be suppressed as contempt 
 of court, after it had run through three editions. No 
 copy of this forlorn hope of the book hunter has ever 
 been found, though doubtless it lurks in some library 
 where its want of the writer's name upon the title 
 page may have kept it from making its reappearance. 
 Though it bore no name, yet Boswell, when writing to 
 Temple over it, speaks of * My publisher Wilkie/ and 
 he seems to have been afraid that the copy sent by him 
 should fall into the hands of strangers. In the Gentle- 
 man 's Magazine for July 1767, however, it is reviewed, 
 but the value of the shilling booklet does not seem to 
 have impressed the critic. ' The Spanish Tale, 1 he 
 says, ' supposes the contests to be finally determined in 
 favour of Don Ferdinand against the family of Ardivoso 
 but the real question is still in dispute, having been 
 removed by appeal to the House of Lords. The 
 pamphlet is zealously but feebly written : the author 
 in some places affects the sublime, and in some the 
 pathetic ; but these are the least tolerable parts of his 
 performance/ Thus airily does the reviewer dismiss 
 Bozzy's determined effort to rouse, as he imagined, the 
 parental and sympathetical feelings, and it is clear at 
 least that, however much its recovery would add to the 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 65 
 
 stock of harmless pleasure among professed Boswellians 
 and collectors, its loss cannot be said to have ' eclipsed 
 the gaiety of nations.' 
 
 During the course of the trial the Tour in Corsica 
 had been preparing. Early in 1768 it was issued from 
 the celebrated press of Robert and Andrew Foulis in 
 Glasgow, and the publishers were the Dillys in the 
 Poultry, London, who were to act for him in all his 
 literary undertakings to the end of his life. It was a 
 lull in the storm of the Douglas crisis, and the old 
 judge, eager enough to see his son associated with 
 anything rational, was not unpleased with its appearing 
 as a pledge of better things. ' Jamie/ he admitted, 
 ' had taen a toot on a new horn.' The account of 
 Corsica which had been made up from various sources 
 of information ran to two hundred and thirty-nine 
 pages ; but the real interest of the volume attaches to 
 the Journal which occupies a hundred and twenty. The 
 translations from Seneca were done by Thomas Day, then 
 very young, the author of Sandford and Merton, and the 
 creator of that constellation of excellence, Mr Barlow, 
 whose connection in any degree with Boswell is almost 
 provocative of a smile. The peculiar orthography of 
 the writer is defended in the preface, for he allows 
 himself not only such divergencies as ' tremenduous/ 
 
 * authour,' ' ambassadour,' but also ' authentick ' and 
 
 * panegyrick.' The dedication of the first edition to 
 Paoli was dated on his own birthday, and the book ran 
 to a third edition before the October of the same year. 
 As purchased by the Dillys for a hundred guineas it 
 would appear to have been a profitable speculation, 
 and the wide circulation to which it attained we shall 
 see was not merely due to accident but to more solid 
 qualities. * Pray read/ says Horace Walpole to his 
 friend Gray, * the new account of Corsica. The author 
 
66 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 is a strange being, and has a rage of knowing everybody 
 that ever was talked of. He forced himself upon me at 
 Paris in spite of my teeth and my doors.' 'Mr B.'s 
 book/ replies Gray with a curious anticipation of the 
 Carlylean canon of criticism ' has pleased and moved 
 me strangely ; all I mean that relates to Paoli. The 
 pamphlet proves, what I have always maintained, that 
 any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if 
 he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity. 
 Of Mr B.'s book I have not the least suspicion, because 
 I am sure he could invent nothing of the kind. 
 The title of this part of his work is a dialogue between 
 a Green Goose and a Hero. ; But Gray was fastidious, 
 in this case blindly so. The merits of Goldsmith he 
 could when dying perceive, but the rollicking humour 
 of Bozzy in this his first book was sealed to the re 
 cluse critic who ' never spoke out/ a thing that never 
 could be safely asserted of the author of the Tour in 
 Corsica. 
 
 That 'authour,' however, was now bent on ex- 
 tracting the sanction of approval from his idol. He 
 hastened to London, heralding his arrival, as was his 
 wont, by a deftly contributed paragraph to the papers. 
 The society journals of to-day have not improved on 
 Boswell in their method of obtaining first hand informa- 
 tion ; he was a most assiduous chronicler of his own 
 actions, and there can be no doubt that there is much 
 Boswell 'copy' buried in the pages of the papers of 
 the time. From the Public Advertizer of February 28th 
 we learn 'James Boswell, Esq., is expected in town,' 
 and, on March 24th, 'yesterday James Boswell, Esq., 
 arrived from Scotland at his lodgings in Half Moon 
 Street, Piccadilly.' He had received no letter from 
 Johnson since the one in which the Latinity of his 
 thesis had been criticised, and Boswell had heard that 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 67 
 
 the publication in his book of a letter from his friend 
 had given offence to its writer. Johnson was in Oxford 
 at the time, and thither flew Bozzy to obtain the ap- 
 proval of his labours and, with an eye to all future 
 contingencies, his sanction for the publication in his 
 biography of all Johnson's letters to him. 'When I 
 am dead, sir,' was the reply, ' you may do as you will.' 
 
 ' My book/ he writes eagerly to Temple, ' has 
 amazing celebrity. Lord Lyttelton, Mr Walpole, Mrs 
 Macaulay, and Mr Garrick, have all written me noble 
 letters about it. There are two Dutch translations 
 going forward.' General Oglethorpe, an old veteran 
 who had seen service under Prince Eugene, and the 
 friend of Pope whose verses upon him ' I had read 
 from my early years,' called upon him and solicited 
 his acquaintance. He became a sort of literary lion. 
 * I am really the great man now/ he cries ; * I have 
 David Hume in the forenoon, Mr Johnson in the after- 
 noon of the same day. I give admirable dinners and 
 good claret, and the moment I go abroad again, which 
 will be in a day or two, I set up my chariot. This is 
 enjoying the fruit of my labours, and appearing like the 
 friend of Paoli.' Alas for that friend ! he confesses 
 to his correspondent that he has been 'wild.' The 
 form of this outbreak may be sufficiently seen by the 
 general reader in the leading questions which at this 
 time Boswell is found putting to Johnson ; for the Life 
 of Johnson, as we shall indicate in its proper place, is 
 no less the life of the biographer, whose mind was ever 
 seeking to shelter itself under the guidance of a stronger 
 force, and to effect a moral anchorage or moorings 
 behind the lee of his great friend. When Bozzy indulges 
 in ' the luxury of noble sentiments,' he is often known 
 to be courting an indemnity to his conscience for lax 
 practice. Longfellow makes Miles Standish in his 
 
68 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 belligerent mood turn in the Caesar to where the thumb- 
 marks in the margin proclaimed that the battle was 
 hottest ; Bos well often indicates the decline and fall of 
 the moralist by an apparently undue vein of pietistic 
 comments. 
 
 The next year was to witness the friend of Paoli in 
 his most eccentric display the Shakesperian Festival 
 inaugurated by Garrick at Stratford. By this ludicrous 
 gathering it is that Boswell is known to the mass of 
 readers who have never cared to know more of ' Corsica 
 Bosweir than what they can gather from the lively 
 picture of Macaulay. There he is known only as it were 
 in the gross, to which indeed, as Johnson said of Milton, 
 the undramatic nature of the essayist's mind was rather 
 prone, careless as it was or incapable of the finer shades 
 of character. Yet, as we know, he was not the solitary 
 masker or mummer in this extraordinary carnival, which 
 seems not creditable to the taste of its promoters, and 
 resembles rather the entry of a travelling circus into a 
 provincial town than a serious commemoration of a great 
 man. However, c thither Mr Boswell repaired with all 
 the enthusiasm of a poetical mind;' as he informs us, 
 ' such an opportunity for the warbling of his Muse was 
 not neglected.' On Wednesday, Sept. 6th, about five in 
 the morning, says The Scots Magazine for that month in 
 its leading article, the performers from Drury Lane 
 paraded the streets of Stratford, and serenaded the ladies 
 with a ballad by Garrick, beginning 
 
 ' Ye Warwickshire lads and ye lasses 
 See what at our Jubilee passes ; 
 Come revel away, rejoice and be glad, 
 For the lad of all lads was a Warwickshire lad, 
 
 Warwickshire lad, 
 
 All be glad, 
 For the lad of all lads was a Warwickshire lad.' 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 69 
 
 Guns were fired, the magistrates assembled, and there 
 was a public breakfast in the town-hall. In this number 
 of the magazine there is a letter extending to seven 
 columns from James Boswell, Esq., on his return to 
 London, after being 'much agitated' by 'this jubilee 
 of genius.' He describes it as ' truly an antique idea, 
 a Grecian thought ; ' the oratorio at the great Stratford 
 church, with the music by Dr Arne, was, he admits, grand 
 and admirable, but 'I could have wished that prayers 
 had been read, and a short sermon preached/ Then 
 the performance of the dedication ode by Garrick is 
 described as ' noble and affecting, like an exhibition in 
 Athens or Rome.' Lord Grosvenor, at the close, went 
 up to Garrick, 'and told him that he had affected 
 his whole frame, showing him his nerves and veins 
 still quivering with agitation.' The masquerade our 
 traveller, as the ' travelled thane,' affects to regard com- 
 placently as an ' entertainment not suited to the genius 
 of the British nation, but to a warmer country, where 
 the people have a great flow of spirits, and a readiness 
 at repartee.' Bozzy no doubt had seen the carnival 
 abroad, and his memories of sunnier skies would not 
 find congenial atmosphere in the unpropitious weather 
 when the Avon rose with the floods of rain, the lower 
 grounds were laid under water, and a guinea for a bed 
 was regarded as an imposition, though ' no one,' declares 
 our hero, ' was understood to come there who had not 
 plenty of money' their own or their father's, presum- 
 ably. The break up seems to have been effected in 
 confusion, but the good-humoured mummer, taking one 
 consideration with another, compares it to eating an arti- 
 choke, where 'we have some fine mouthfuls, but also 
 swallow the leaves and the hair, which are confoundedly 
 difficult of digestion. After all, I am highly satisfied 
 with my artichoke.' 
 
70 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 He brought ' the warbling of his muse ' with him. It 
 is no better or worse than the staple. In the character 
 of a Corsican, he sings 
 
 1 From the rude banks of Colo's rapid flood, , 
 Alas ! too deeply tinged with patriot blood ; 
 O'er which, dejected, injur'd Freedom bends, 
 And sighs indignant o'er all Europe sends, 
 Behold a Corsican ! In better days 
 Eager I sought my country's fame to raise. 
 Now when I'm exiled from my native land 
 I come to join this classic festal band ; 
 To soothe my soul on Avon's sacred stream, 
 And from your joy to catch a cheering gleam.' 
 
 After an apostrophe to happy Britons, on whose pro- 
 pitious isle propitious freedom ever deigns to smile, 
 he closes with an appeal 
 
 ' But let me plead for liberty distress'd, 
 And warm for her each sympathetic breast ; 
 Amidst the splendid honours which you bear, 
 To save a sister island be your care ; 
 With generous ardour make us also free, 
 And give to Corsica a noble Jubilee. ' 
 
 Colman and Foote, of course, as comedians were there, 
 but Goldsmith and Johnson shewed their sense by their 
 absence. The only trace of Davy's old master was 
 found in a Coventry ribbon put out by 'a whimsical 
 haberdasher/ with the motto from Johnson's Prologue 
 at the opening of Drury Lane in 1747 'Each change 
 of many colour 'd life he drew.' 
 
 Bos well had a free hand as a writer for the London 
 Magazine, in which he had a proprietary interest. To 
 it he contributed the following account, accompanied 
 with a portrait the source of much of Macaulay's 
 
JAMES BOSWELL ?i 
 
 indictment. ' One of the most remarkable masks upon 
 this occasion was James Bos well, Esq., in the dress of 
 an armed Corsican chief. He entered the amphitheatre 
 about twelve o'clock. He wore a short dark-coloured 
 coat of coarse cloth, scarlet waistcoat and breeches, and 
 black spatterdashes; his cap or bonnet was of black 
 cloth ; on the front of it was embroidered in gold letters 
 viva la liberta, and on one side of it was a handsome 
 blue feather and cockade, so that it had an elegant as 
 well as a warlike appearance. On the breast of his coat 
 was sewed a Moor's head, the crest of Corsica, sur- 
 rounded with branches of laurel. He had also a cart- 
 ridge-pouch, into which was stuck a stiletto, and on his 
 left side a pistol was hung upon the belt of his cartridge- 
 pouch. He had a fusee slung across his shoulder, wore 
 no powder in his hair, but had it plaited at full length 
 with a knot of blue ribbons at the end of it. He had, 
 by way of a staff, a very curious vine all of one piece, 
 emblematical of the sweet bard of Avon. He wore no 
 mask, saying it was not proper for a gallant Corsican. 
 So soon as he came into the room he drew universal 
 attention. The novelty of the Corsican dress, its be- 
 coming appearance, and the character of the brave 
 nation concurred to distinguish the armed Corsican 
 chief. He was first accosted by Mrs Garrick, with 
 whom he had a good deal of conversation. There was 
 an admirable dialogue between Lord Grosvenor, in the 
 character of a Turk, and the Corsican on the different 
 constitution of the countries so opposite to each other, 
 Despotism and Liberty ; and Captain Thomson, of the 
 navy, in the character of an honest tar, kept it up very 
 well ; he expressed a strong inclination to stand by the 
 brave islanders. Mr Boswell danced both a minuet and 
 a country dance with a very pretty lady, Mrs Sheldon, 
 wife to Captain Sheldon, of the 38th Regiment of Foot, 
 
72 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 who was dressed in a genteel domino, and before she 
 danced threw off her mask/ 
 
 He adds a cool puff of his own verses, ' which, it is 
 thought, are well suited to the occasion, while at the 
 same time they preserve the true Corsican character/ 
 About a month after this masquerade, Goldsmith dined 
 at Boswell's lodging with Garrick, Johnson, Davies, 
 and others, where 'Goldsmith/ says the biographer, 
 'strutted about, bragging of his dress, and I believe 
 was seriously vain of it, for his mind was wonderfully 
 prone to such impressions ! ' Bozzy could criticise, as 
 on all occasions, the bloom coloured coat of ' honest 
 Goldsmith/ yet he was eager for Garrick to fall in with 
 the idea of the tradesmen of Stratford to make the 
 Jubilee an annual event in the interests of local trade, 
 and ' I flatter myself with the prospect of attending you 
 at several more Jubilees.' 
 
 Though he had again commenced in London his 
 attendance on Johnson and note-taking, there was now 
 a divided source of attraction. Things had gone hard 
 with Paoli since Boswell had been in the island. In 
 spite of his Irish brigades and his British volunteers, the 
 overwhelming forces which the French were able to put 
 in the field, on the cession of the island to them by the 
 Genoese, brought to an end the stubborn resistance of 
 the inhabitants. In the August of 1768 Boswell had 
 raised in Scotland a subscription of ^700 for ordnance 
 furnished by the Carron Iron Work Company, and in 
 1769 there had issued from the press a little duodecimo, 
 ' British Essays in favour of the Brave Corsicans : 
 collected and published by James Boswell, Esq.' The 
 papers are twenty in number, some by himself, others 
 by ' a gentleman whose name would do honour to any 
 cause (whom we think to have been Trecothick, the 
 successor of Beckford, as Lord Mayor of London), and 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 73 
 
 the greatest part furnished by persons unknown to me.' 
 They deal with the dangers to trade from France and 
 the Bourbon Compact, and point at the value of Corsica 
 as a station superior to Gibraltar or Minorca. One 
 paper signed 'P. J.' has the undoubted Boswellian 
 touch in dealing with the sailors thrown idle by the cessa- 
 tion of the along-shore Mediterranean trade. * None are 
 less avaricious than our honest tars, nor have they, in 
 reality, any reason to be discontented. Every common 
 sailor has at least five and thirty shillings a month, 
 over and above which he has his victuals and drink, and 
 that in great abundance. There is no such thing as 
 stinting aboard a ship, unless when reduced to diffi- 
 culties by stormy weather. The crew have their three 
 meals a day regularly, and if they should be hungry 
 between meals, there is always a biscuit or a luncheon of 
 something cold to be had? 
 
 France had bought Corsica from Genoa in May 
 1768. Marboeuf, whom Boswell had found in the 
 island, had been superseded, and a descent of the 
 French under Count Vaux with 20,000 men ended the 
 war. Paoli escaped to a ruinous convent on the shore, 
 and, after lying there in concealment, he embarked on 
 an English vessel bound for Leghorn. On September 
 2oth he reached London, and the Public Advertizer of 
 October 4th, through its faithful correspondent, informed 
 its readers how ' On Sunday last General Paoli, accom- 
 panied by James Boswell, Esq., took an airing in Hyde 
 Park in his coach. 7 On the evening of the loth he 
 was presented by the traveller to Johnson, who was 
 highly pleased with the lofty port of the stranger and the 
 easy 'elegance of manners, the brand of the soldier, 
 rhomme tfepee? 
 
 An impression is abroad that Boswell's books were 
 not taken seriously. Nothing could be more remote 
 
74 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 from the truth. The Whigs were in favour of his views, 
 and Burke, together with Frederick the Great, believed 
 our interests would suffer by the increase of French 
 power in the Mediterranean. Shelburne, for Chatham 
 had resigned before November 1768, was the advocate 
 of similar views, telling our ambassador at Versailles to 
 remonstrate with the French court, while Junius, in his 
 letter to the Duke of Grafton, told the country that 
 Corsica would never have been invaded by the French, 
 but for the sight of a weak and distracted ministry. 
 When the hand of Napoleon was heavy on the Genoese, 
 they remembered that their cession of the island had 
 made their master, by his birth at Ajaccio on August 
 15, 1769, a Frenchman. But the nation at the time 
 of BoswelPs books was weary of war, and their influence, 
 though great, was not visible in any actual political 
 results. 
 
 Bos well had expected to draw the sage on the sub- 
 ject of matrimony, having promised himself, as he says, 
 a good deal of instructive conversation on the conduct 
 of the married state. But the oracles were dumb. On 
 his return to the north he was married, on the 25th 
 November 1769, to his cousin. We find in the Scots 
 Magazine of that month the following extracts under 
 the list of marriages : 
 
 'At Lainshaw, in the shire of Air, JAMES BOSWELL, Esq., 
 of Auchinleck, advocate, to Miss PEGGY MONTGOMERY, 
 daughter of the late DAVID MONTGOMERY of Lainshaw, 
 Esq. 1 
 
 'At Edinburgh, ALEXANDER BOSWELL, Esq., of Auchin- 
 leck, one of the Lords of Session and Justiciary, to Miss 
 BETTY BOSWELL, second daughter of JOHN BOSWELL, 
 Esq. , of Balmuto, deceased. ' 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 75 
 
 His father, now past sixty, had married again, and 
 married a cousin for the second time, like his son on 
 the present occasion. That they were married on the 
 same day and at different places affords a clear indica- 
 tion that the father and son were no longer on the best 
 of terms. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 LOVE AFFAIRS LITERARY CLUB. 1766-73 
 
 ' How happy could I be with either, 
 Were t'other dear charmer away.' GAY. 
 
 ' LOVE,' wrote Madame de Stael, c is with man a thing 
 apart, 'tis woman's whole existence.' This is not true 
 at least of Bos well, for his love affairs fill as large a 
 part in his life as in that of Benjamin Constant. A 
 most confused chapter withal, and one that luckily was 
 not known to Macaulay, whose colours would otherwise 
 have been more brilliant. We find Bozzy paying his 
 addresses at one and the same time to at least eight 
 ladies, exclusive as this is of sundry minor divinities of 
 a fleeting and more temporary nature not calling here 
 for allusion. His first divinity was the grass-widow of 
 Moffat, and here Temple had been compelled to remon- 
 strate in spite of all the lover's philandering about her 
 freedom from her husband, who had used her ill. Were 
 she unfaithful, he declares her worthy to be 'pierced 
 with a Corsican dagger,' but in March he has found it 
 too much like a 'settled plan of licentiousness,' dis- 
 covering her to be an ill-bred rompish girl, debasing his 
 dignity, without refinement, though handsome and lively. 
 Then there is the quarrel and the reconciliation, she 
 vowing she loved him more than ever she had done her 
 husband, but meeting with opposition from his brother 
 76 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 77 
 
 David and others, who furnished the love-sick heart of 
 her adorer with examples of her faithlessness such as 
 made him recoil. He vows now his frailties are at an 
 end, and he resolves to turn out an admirable member 
 of society. He had broken with her as with the 
 gardener's daughter a year ago an everlasting lesson 
 to him. 
 
 By March 1767 the reigning favourite was Miss 
 Bosville of Yorkshire. But his lot being cast in Scotland 
 would be an objection to the beauty; then we hear 
 of a young lady in the vicinity of whose claims Lord 
 Auchinleck approved, because their lands lay happily 
 together for family extension. She was just eighteen, 
 pious, good-tempered and genteel, and for four days 
 she had been on a visit to 'the romantick groves' of 
 his ancestors, when suddenly the scene is changed for 
 the Sienese signora of whom we heard upon his travels. 
 c My Italian angel/ he cries, ' is constant ; I had a letter 
 from her but a few days ago, which made me cry/ 
 He conjures his friend Temple to come to him, and 
 'on that Arthur Seat where our youthful fancies roved 
 abroad shall we take counsel together.' The local 
 divinity we learn is Miss Blair of Adamtown; he has 
 been drinking her health, and aberrations from sobriety 
 and virtue have ensued, but he thought things would be 
 brought to a climax were Temple to visit her. A long 
 letter of commission follows, the envoy is instructed to 
 appear as his old friend, praising him to Miss Blair for 
 his good qualities. Temple is adjured to dwell upon his 
 odd, inconstant, impetuous nature, how he is accustomed 
 to women of intrigue, and he is to ask of the fair one if 
 she does not think there is insanity in the Boswell 
 family. She is to hear of his travels, his acquaintance 
 with foreign princes, Voltaire and Rousseau, his desire 
 to have a house of his own ; and then he diverges into 
 
78 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 practicality when he desires his friend to 'study the 
 mother/ and take notes of all that passed, as it might 
 have the effect of fixing the fate of the lover. Temple, 
 it may be imagined, did not interpret his commission in 
 such a literal spirit, and inconstancy and insanity could 
 hardly be recommendations in Miss Blair's eyes. That 
 such should be the case, outside the confessions of Mr 
 Rochester in Jane Eyre, would appear to the com- 
 missioner an obvious fact. 
 
 A silence followed on Temple's departure from the 
 divinity. Boswell dreaded a certain nabob, ' a man of 
 copper,' as his rival. Then he believed the fair 
 offended by his own Spanish stateliness and gravity ; and 
 again a letter, 'written with all the warmth of Italian 
 affection,' restores the signora to the first place, from 
 which she is deposed by a note from Miss Blair, 
 explaining that his letter had been delayed a week at 
 the Ayr post-office. Then fresh ravings, clouded by 
 the belief that she is cunning and sees his weakness, for 
 three people at Ayr have assured him she is a jilt, and 
 he is shocked at the risk he has run, a warning for the 
 future to him against ' indulging the least fondness for 
 a Scotch lass.' He has, he feels, a soul of a more 
 Southern frame, and some Englishwoman ought to be 
 sensible of his merit, though the Dutch translator of his 
 Tour, Mademoiselle de Zuyl, has been writing to him. 
 Random talking is his dread, he must guard against it, 
 and Miss Blair revives. ' I must have her learn the 
 harpsichord,' he cries, ' and French ; she shall be one 
 of the finest women in the island.' Later on they have 
 had a long meeting, of which space only prevents the 
 inimitable reproduction, 'squeezing and kissing her 
 fine hand, while she looked at me with those beautiful 
 black eyes.' He meets her at the house of Lord 
 Kames, he sees her at Othello she was in tears at 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 79 
 
 the affecting scenes, and 'rather leaned 1 to him (he 
 thought), and * the jealous Moor described my own soul.' 
 But true love did never yet run smooth ; he has been 
 ' as wild as ever. Trust me in time coming ; I will 
 give you my word of honour/ Then curious psycho- 
 logical trait 'to-morrow I shall be happy with my 
 devotions/ 
 
 By the beginning of 1768 he fears all is over. A 
 rumour a false one as it proved had reached him 
 that the divinity was to be married to Sir Alexander 
 Gilmour, M.P. for Midlothian. He gets friendly with 
 the nabob, warms him with old claret, and bewails with 
 him their hapless devotion. They agree to propose in 
 turn, and, being in turn rejected, he feels sure that ' a 
 Howard, or some other of the noblest in the kingdom ' 
 is to be his fate. The Dutch translator again holds the 
 field, to be soon dismissed for her frivolity and her 
 infidelity. Then Miss Dick of Prestonfield reigns with 
 solid qualifications she lacks a fortune, but is fine, 
 young, healthy, and amiable. A visit to Holland, to 
 finally decide on the Mademoiselle's claims, was pro- 
 posed, but his father, warned in time, would not 
 consent. Temple, too, was against this, and 'Temple 
 thou reasonest well/ he cries, and thinks his abnegation 
 will be a solace to his worthy father on his circuit. 
 Freed now from Miss Blair and the Dutch divinity, he 
 is devoted to la belle Irlandaise, 'just sixteen, with the 
 sweetest countenance and a Dublin education/ Never 
 till now had he been so truly in love ; every flower is 
 united, and she is a rose without a thorn. Her name 
 ' Mary Anne ' he has carved upon a tree, and cutting 
 off a lock of her hair she had promised Bozzy not to 
 marry a lord before March, or forget him. ' Sixteen/ 
 he says ; ' innocence and gaiety make me quite a Sicilian 
 
8o FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 His book had dissipated his professional energies, 
 and he had even taken to gaming. Incidentally we 
 learn that he had lost more than he could pay, and that 
 Mr Sheridan had advanced enough to clear him, on a 
 promise that he should not engage in play for three years. 
 Mary Anne has added to his complications by her 
 forgetfulness, and the local candidate Miss Blair re- 
 appears. Favoured as she was by his father, it would 
 have been easy to bring things to a climax, but on her 
 mother's part there was some not unnatural coldness 
 over his indiscreet talk about his love of the heiress. 
 Bozzy was a convivial knight-errant in what was called 
 'Saving the ladies.' At clubs and gatherings any 
 member would toast his idol in a bumper, and then 
 another champion would enter his peerless Dulcinea in 
 two bumpers, to be routed by the original toper taking 
 off four. The deepest drinker ' saved' his lady/ as the 
 phrase ran ; though, says George Thomson speaking of 
 the old concerts in St Cecilia's Hall, at the foot of 
 Niddry's Wynd, which were maintained by noblemen 
 and gentlemen, the bold champion had often consider- 
 able difficulty in saving himself from the floor, in his 
 efforts to regain his seat ! Miss Burnet of Monboddo, 
 celebrated by Burns, and Miss Betty Home, he 
 describes as the reigning beauties of the time deeply 
 involved in thus causing the fall of man. Boswell was 
 not behind, and he ascribes his aberrations to the 
 ' drinking habit which still prevails in Scotland,' 
 renewing good intentions, only to be broken in the 
 same letter that reveals the Moffat lady again, ' like a 
 girl of eighteen, with the finest black hair,' whom he 
 loves so much that he is in a fever. ' This? he adds 
 truly enough, 'is unworthy of Paoti s friend? 
 
 The May of 1769 saw him in Ireland, where his 
 relations in County Down secured his entry into the 
 
JAMES BOS WELL 81 
 
 best society. A dispatch to the Public Advertize^ of 
 July yth, informed the public that 'James Boswell, 
 Esq., dined with His Grace the Duke of Leinster at 
 his seat at Carton. He went by special invitation to 
 meet the Lord Lieutenant ; came next morning with 
 his Excellency to the Phoenix Park, where he was 
 present at a review of Sir Joseph Yorke's dragoons ; 
 he dined with the Lord Mayor, and is now set out on 
 his return to Scotland.' The belle Irlandaise had 
 forgotten him, but it is to this occasion that we may 
 refer some verses that were published by his son Sir 
 Alexander. Chambers thinks they refer to his cousin, 
 but the general belief tends in the direction of the 
 notorious Margaret Caroline Rudd, the associate in 
 later years of the brothers Perreau, who were executed 
 for forgery. In the Life of Johnson we find Boswell, 
 in 1776, expressing to his companion a desire to be 
 introduced to this person, so celebrated for her address 
 and insinuation, and later on he is shewn, on his own 
 confession, to have visited her, 'induced by the fame 
 of her talents and irresistible power of fascination,' 
 and to have sent an account of this interview to his 
 wife, but to have offered its perusal first, 'as it ap- 
 peared to me highly entertaining,' to Temple, who 
 was indignant over it. It would appear, then, that 
 Boswell did not reveal to Johnson his former flirtation 
 with this notorious woman, but we think that the obvious 
 marks of the brogue in the verses shew conclusively that 
 either the feeling was imitative and based on an earlier 
 Irish song, or that the verses were judged by BoswelFs 
 son, not too devoted, as we shall find, to his father's 
 memory, to be free from offence. 
 
 ' O Larghan Clanbrassil, how sweet is thy sound, 
 To my tender remembrance as Love's sacred ground ; 
 
8s FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 For there Marg'ret Caroline first charm'd my sight, 
 And fill'd my young heart with a flutt'ring delight. 
 
 When I thought her my own, ah ! too short seemed the day 
 For a jaunt to Downpatrick, or a trip on the sea ; 
 To express what I felt, then all language was vain, 
 'Twas in truth what the poets have studied to feign. 
 
 But, too late, I found even she could deceive^ 
 And nothing was left but to sigh, weep, and rave ; 
 Distracted, I flew from my dear native shore, 
 Resolved to see Larghan Clanbrassil no more. 
 
 Yet still in some moments enchanted I find 
 A ray of her fondness beams soft on my mind ; 
 While thus in bless'd fancy my angel I see, 
 All the world is a Larghan Clanbrassil to me.' 
 
 On this journey with Boswell there was a Margaret 
 his own cousin, and it is curious to find him in this 
 mood of sentimental philandering, were it no worse, 
 when we have now to see Bozzy at the end of his love 
 affairs. When his great work was completed in 1791, 
 its author contributed to the European Magazine for 
 May and June a little sketch of himself, in order to give 
 a fillip to its circulation. There he describes jauntily 
 his Irish tour, and after what we know of his erratic 
 course, it is delightful to come across this sage chronicler 
 of his dead wife, circulating testimonials to her excellences, 
 to which no doubt he was oblivious in her lifetime. 
 ' They had/ he writes, ' from their earliest years lived 
 in the most intimate and unreserved friendship.' His 
 love of the fair sex has been already mentioned (he had 
 quoted the song of * the Soapers ' in our first chapter), 
 and she was the constant yet prudent and delicate 
 confidante of all his * egarements du coeur et de V esprit? 
 This we may doubt, and the gracefully allusive French 
 quotation reminds us of Mr Pepys' use of that language 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 83 
 
 when his wife was in his mind. This jaunt was the 
 occasion of Mr Bos well's resolving at last to engage 
 himself in that connection to which he had always 
 declared himself averse. In short, he determined to 
 become a married man. He requested her, with 
 her excellent judgment and more sedate manners, 
 to do him the favour of accepting him with all his 
 faults, and though he assures his readers he had uni- 
 formly protested that a large fortune had been with him 
 a requisite in the fair, he was yet ( willing to waive that 
 in consideration of her peculiar merit ! ' 
 
 Hearts are caught in the rebound, and Bozzy had 
 solaced his loss of the belle Irlandaise with the sympathy 
 of his fellow-traveller. Having let his fancies roam so 
 far abroad as Siena and Holland, the lover had now 
 returned like the bird at evening to the nest from which 
 it flew. She had no fortune, and ' the penniless lass 
 wi' the lang pedigree,' related as she was to the 
 Eglintoun branch and other high families, had not in 
 the eyes of his father the landed qualifications of Miss 
 Blair, whose property lay so convenient for the extension 
 of the Boswell acres. This may have been the cause of 
 the paternal anger and the separate marriages on the 
 same day. The wives of literary men have ever been a 
 fruitful source of disquisition to the admirers of their 
 heroes, and Terentia, Gemma Donati, and Anne 
 Hathaway, have divided the biographers of Cicero, 
 Dante, and Shakespeare. To us it seems that, like his 
 father, she had much to bear, hampered by their 
 domestic difficulties through her husband's constant 
 dependence on that father for his income, and eyed 
 with undeserved suspicion by the judge and his second 
 wife as a Mordecai in the gate, penniless and yet 
 supposed to be the cause of Boswell's pecuniary em- 
 barrassments and indiscretions. The marriage was 
 
84 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 deferred till after the Stratford Jubilee, and the newly 
 married pair took up their house in ChessePs Buildings 
 in the Canongate. For a year and a half after his 
 marriage his correspondence with Johnson underwent 
 an entire cessation, and in the August of 1771 General 
 Paoli made a tour in Scotland, which, for a time, called 
 forth the best organizing abilities of his friend. From 
 the London Magazine of the day, in an account contri- 
 buted by our hero, we learn how Paoli had paid 'a 
 visit to James Boswell, Esq., who was the first gentleman 
 of this country who visited Corsica, and whose writings 
 have made the brave islanders and their general pro- 
 perly known over Europe.' Boswell waited on the 
 exile and the Polish Ambassador at Ramsay's Inn, at 
 the foot of St Mary's Wynd, visiting with them 
 Linlithgow and Carron, 'where the general had a 
 prodigious pleasure in viewing the forge where were 
 formed the cannon and war-like stores ' sent to Corsica 
 by his Scottish admirers. At Glasgow they were 
 entertained by the professors, and saw 'the elegant 
 printing of the Scottish Stephani, the Messrs Foulis,' 
 and no doubt their guide managed to remind their 
 excellencies of a certain Tour in Corsica emanating 
 thence. Auchinleck was visited to 'the joy of my 
 worthy father and me at seeing the Corsican Hero in 
 our romantick groves/ as he tells Garrick, and on their 
 return to Glasgow the freedom of the city was conferred 
 on Paoli by Lord Provost Dunlop.* At Edinburgh 
 ' the general slept under the roof of his ever grateful 
 friend.' The whole forms a favourable specimen of 
 BoswelPs organizing capacities, and viewed in relation 
 
 * By the Town Clerk Depute of Glasgow, R. Renwick, Esq., we 
 are informed that no notice of this enrolment of General Paoli was 
 entered at the time, pursuant to the custom of the Register over 
 honorary burgesships. 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 85 
 
 to the friendly intercourse he is found maintaining with 
 prominent and influential persons, our regret is but 
 increased that in the interests of his wife and children 
 his abilities were not exercised in a more strictly 
 professional channel. 
 
 London he visited in the March of 1772 over an 
 appeal to the Lords from the Court of Session. John- 
 son was now in good health, and was eager 'to see 
 Beattie's College/ In the Scots Magazine for February 
 1773 there is mentioned a masked ball, attended by 
 seventy persons of quality, given in Edinburgh by Sir 
 Alexander Macdonald and his wife, Miss Bosville of 
 Yorkshire, one of Boswell's loves. Croker says that the 
 masquerade for which he was rallied by Johnson was 
 given by the Dowager Countess of Fife, and that Bozzy 
 went as a dumb conjurer ; but from the expression of the 
 Magazine, ' an entertainment little known in this part 
 of the Kingdom/ coupled with the words employed by 
 Johnson, there can be no doubt that Croker is wrong, 
 and that the host on this occasion was the churlish chief, 
 whose inhospitable ways they were to experience in Skye. 
 He was now near the great honour of his life, admission 
 to that Literary Club, of which, said Sir William Jones, 
 ' I will only say that there is no branch of human know- 
 ledge on which some of our members are not capable of 
 giving information.' Never was honour better deserved 
 or better repaid. Without his record the fame of that 
 club would have passed away, surviving at best in some 
 sort of hazy companionship with the Kit-Cat, Button's, 
 Will's, and other clubs and assemblies. Never was there 
 a club of which each member was better qualified to 
 take care of his own fame with posterity. None of 
 Johnson's associates would have hesitated in declaring 
 an extended date of renown for the Rambler ; and per- 
 haps he himself would have staked the reputation 
 
86 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 assured, as Cowper said, by the tears of bards and 
 heroes in order to immortalize the dead, on his Rasselas 
 or the Dictionary. Yet he and most members of that 
 club, apart from the record of Boswell, would be but 
 names to the literary antiquary, and be by the mass of 
 readers entirely forgotten. 
 
 He had canvassed the members. Johnson wrote, on 
 April 23rd, to Goldsmith, who was in the chair that 
 evening, to consider Boswell as proposed by himself in 
 his absence. On the night of the ballot, April 3oth, 
 Boswell dined at Beauclerk's, where, after the company 
 had gone to the club, he was left till the fate of his 
 election should be announced. After Johnson had taken 
 the thing in hand there was not much danger, yet poor 
 Bozzy ' sat in a state of anxiety which even the charm- 
 ing conversation of Lady Di Beauclerk could not entirely 
 dissipate.' There he received the tidings of his election, 
 and he hastened to the place of meeting. Burke he met 
 that night for the first time, and on his entrance, Johnson, 
 ' with humorous formality, gave me a charge, pointing out 
 the conduct expected from me as a good member of the 
 club/ That charge we can believe Forster to be right 
 in suspecting to be a caution against publishing abroad 
 the proceedings and the talk of the members. 
 
 In the autumn of the year, as they drew near to 
 Monboddo, Johnson, we should think with excessive 
 rudeness, told him * several of the members wished to 
 keep you out. Burke told me, he doubted if you were 
 fit for it : but, now you are in, none of them are sorry. 
 Burke says, that you have so much good humour 
 naturally, it is scarce a virtue.' The faithful Bozzy 
 replied, ' They were afraid of you, sir, as it was you who 
 proposed me ; ' and the doctor was prone to admit that 
 if the one blackball necessary to exclude had been given, 
 they knew they never would have got in another mem- 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 87 
 
 her. Yet even from this rebuff he managed to deftly 
 extract a compliment. Beauclerk, the doctor said, had 
 been very earnest for the admission, and Beauclerk, 
 replied Boswell, ' has a keenness of mind which is very 
 uncommon/ The witty Topham, along with Reynolds, 
 Garrick, and others, is immortalized in the pages of the 
 man who was not thought by the wits of Gerrard Street 
 fit for their club. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES. 1773 
 
 ' Breaking the silence of the seas 
 Among the farthest Hebrides.' WORDSWORTH. 
 
 WHEN Bos well was leaving London in May he called, 
 for the last time, upon Goldsmith, round whom the 
 clouds of misfortune were fast settling, and who was 
 planning a Dictionary of Arts and Sciences as a means 
 of extrication from his embarrassments. In such circum- 
 stances, it was not unnatural for Goldsmith to revert to 
 his own past travels, and to the reflection that he was 
 unlikely again to set out upon them, unless sheltered 
 like Johnson behind a pension. He assured Boswell 
 that he would never be able to lug the dead weight of 
 the Rambler through the Highlands. The enthusiastic 
 pioneer, however, was loud in the praises of his com- 
 panion ; Goldsmith thought him not equal to Burke, 
 ( who winds into a subject like a serpent.' The other, 
 with more than wonted irrelevance, maintained that 
 Johnson was ' the Hercules who strangled serpents 
 in his cradle ; ' and with these characteristic utterances 
 they parted, never again to meet. Throughout his 
 great work, Boswell shews ever a curious depreciation 
 of Goldsmith. Rivalry for the good graces of their 
 common friend Johnson, as Scott thought, and the fear 
 of his older acquaintance as the possible biographer 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 89 
 
 made him suspicious of the merits of the poet, who 
 figures in the pages of Boswell as a foil for his gently 
 patronizing tone, * honest Goldsmith.' 
 
 The tour to the Hebrides had been a project which 
 had occurred to them in the first days of their friendship. 
 The Description of the Western Isles of Scotland (1703) 
 by Martin, had been put into Johnson's hands at a very 
 early age by his father ; and, though for long he had dis- 
 appointed the expectations of his friend, he had talked 
 of it in the spring of this year in such a way as to lead 
 Boswell to write to Beattie, Robertson, Lord Elibank, 
 and the chiefs of the Macdonalds and the Macleods, 
 for invitations such as he could shew the doctor. Mrs 
 Thrale also and others were induced to forward the 
 scheme, and at last the Rambler set out on the 6th day 
 of August. He was nine days upon the road, including 
 two at Newcastle, where he picked up his friend Scott 
 (Lord Stowell), and after passing Berwick, Dunbar and 
 Prestonpans, the coach late in the evening deposited 
 Johnson at Boyd's inn, The White Horse^ in the 
 Canongate, the rendezvous of the old Hanoverian 
 faction, which occupied the site of the present building 
 from which this volume, one hundred and twenty-three 
 years later, is published. On the Saturday evening of 
 his arrival a note was dispatched by him to Boswell, 
 who flew to him, and 'exulted in the thought that I 
 now had him actually in Caledonia.' 
 
 Arm in arm they walked up the High Street to 
 BoswelPs house in James's Court, to which he had 
 removed from the Canongate. The first impression 
 of the Scottish capital was not pleasing, for at ten the 
 beat of the city drums was heard ; and, amid cries of 
 gardy loo, what Oldham euphemistically calls 'the 
 perils of the night,' were thrown over the windows 
 down on the pavement, in the absence of covered 
 
90 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 sewers. When Captain Burt before this time had 
 been in Edinburgh, a ' caddie ' had preceded him on 
 a scouting expedition with cries of ' haud your han',' 
 and among flank and rear discharges he had passed 
 to his quarters. A zealous Scotsman, as Bqswell says, 
 could have wished the doctor to be less gifted with the 
 sense of smell, however much the sense of the breadth 
 of the street and the height of the buildings impressed 
 him. His wife had tea waiting, and they sat till two 
 in the morning. To shew respect for the sage, Mrs 
 Bos well had given up her own room, which her 
 husband ' cannot but gratefully mention, as one of 
 a thousand obligations which I owe her, since the great 
 obligation of her being pleased to accept of me as her 
 husband/ 
 
 Next morning, on the Sunday, Mr Scott and Sir 
 Wm. Forbes of Pitsligo breakfasted with them, and the 
 host's heart was delighted by the 'little infantine 
 noise ' which his child Veronica made, with the 
 appearance of listening to the great man. The fond 
 father with a cheerful recklessness, not realized we 
 fear, declared she should have for this five hundred 
 pounds of additional fortune. 
 
 The best society in the capital was invited to meet 
 Johnson at breakfast and dinner Robertson, Hailes, 
 Gregory, Blacklock, and others. James's Court was 
 rather a distinguished part of the city, and an improve- 
 ment upon the former quarters in Chessel's Buildings. 
 The inhabitants, says Robert Chambers, took them- 
 selves so seriously as to keep a clerk to record their 
 proceedings, together with a scavenger of their own, 
 and held among themselves their social meetings and 
 balls. Hume had occupied part of the house before 
 Johnson's visit, though three years had passed since he 
 had moved to the new town into St David Street. 
 
JAMES BOSW&iSS^ 91 
 
 Writing from his old house to Adam Smith, he is 
 glad to ' have come within sight of you, and to have 
 a view of Kirkcaldy from my windows ; ' the study 
 of the historian, to which he turned fondly from the 
 Parisian salons ', is represented in Guy Mannering as 
 the library of Pleydell with its fine view from the 
 windows, 'which commanded that incomparable pros- 
 pect of the ground between Edinburgh and the sea, 
 the Firth of Forth with its islands, and the varied shore 
 of Fife to the northward/ Bozzy may have been 
 reticent about the former tenant; he was 'not clear 
 that it was right in me to keep company with him,' 
 though he thought the man greater or better than 
 his books. No word then was sent to him, nor to 
 Adam Smith across the Forth to Kirkcaldy. They 
 visited the Parliament House, where Harry Erskine 
 was presented to Johnson, and, having made his bow, 
 slipped a shilling into Boswell's hand, ' for the sight of 
 his bear.' Holyrood and the University were in- 
 spected, and as they passed up the College-Wynd, 
 where Goldsmith in his medical student days in Edin- 
 burgh had lived, Scott, as a child of two years, may 
 have seen the party. On the i8th they set out from 
 the capital, with the Parthian shot from Lord Auchin- 
 leck to a friend 'there's nae hope for Jamie, man; 
 Jamie is gaen clean gyte. What do you think, man ? 
 He's done wi' Paoli. He's off wi' the land-louping 
 scoundrel of a Corsican, and whose tail do you think 
 he has pinned himself to now, man? A dominie, 
 an auld dominie; he keepit a schule and ca'ad it an 
 acaadamy ! " No more bitter taunt could have been 
 levelled against Johnson, with his memories of Edial, 
 near Lichfield ; readers who may remember the 
 munificent manner in which the heritors of their day 
 had provided for Ruddiman, Michael Bruce, and others, 
 
92 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 will see the contempt that the old judge had felt for the 
 past of the Rambler. Johnson had left behind him 
 in a drawer a volume of his diary ; and, as this would 
 have been excellent copy for his projected Life^ we 
 feel the temptation to which Boswell was .exposed. 
 1 1 wish/ he says naively, ' that female curiosity had 
 been strong enough to have had it all transcribed ; 
 which might easily have been done; and I think the 
 theft, being pro bono publico, might have been forgiven. 
 But I may be wrong. My wife told me she never 
 once had looked into it. She did not seem quite easy 
 when we left her ; but away we went ! ' 
 
 The character-sketch of Johnson, given at the 
 opening of the book is full of fine shading and 
 touches ; but the traveller who now follows them on the 
 journey will hardly, in comparison with his own tourist 
 attire, recognise what in 1773 was thought fit and 
 convenient costume. 
 
 * He wore a full suit of plain brown clothes, with twisted hair 
 buttons of the same colour, a large bushy greyish wig, a plain shirt, 
 black worsted stockings, and silver buckles. Upon this tour, when 
 journeying, he wore boots, and a very wide brown cloth greatcoat, 
 with pockets which might have almost held the two volumes of his 
 folio Dictionary ; and he carried in his hand a large English oak 
 stick. Let me not be censured for mentioning such minute particu- 
 lars. Everything relative to so great a man is worth observing. I 
 remember Dr Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures at Glasgow, 
 told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes, 
 instead of buckles.' 
 
 A companion vignette of himself is added by Boswell. 
 
 'A gentleman of ancient blood, the pride of which was his 
 predominant passion. He was then in his thirty-third year, and 
 had been about four years happily married. His inclination was to 
 be a soldier ; but his father had pressed him into the profession of 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 93 
 
 the law. He had travelled a good deal, and seen many varieties 
 of human life. He had thought more than anyone had supposed, 
 and had a pretty good stock of general learning and knowledge. 
 He had rather too little, than too much prudence ; and, his 
 imagination being lively, he often said things of which the effect 
 was very different from the intention. He resembled sometimes 
 
 ' The best good man, with the worst natur'd muse.' 
 
 The doctor who was thrifty over this tour had not 
 thought it necessary to bring his own black servant ; 
 but Boswell's man, Joseph Ritter, a Bohemian, a fine 
 stately fellow over six feet, who had been over much of 
 Europe, was invaluable to them in their journey. For 
 this the valiant Rambler had provided a pair of pistols, 
 powder, and a quantity of bullets, but the assurance of 
 their needlessness had induced him to leave them 
 behind with the precious diary in the keeping of Mrs 
 Boswell. 
 
 Such a tour was then a feat for a man of sixty-four, 
 in a country which, to the Englishman of his day, was as 
 unknown as St Kilda is now to the mass of Scotchmen. 
 The London citizen who, says Lockhart, 'makes Loch 
 Lomond his wash-pot, and throws his shoe over Ben 
 Nevis/ can with difficulty imagine a journey in the 
 Hebrides with rainy weather, in open boats, or upon 
 horseback over wild moorland and morasses, a journey 
 that even to Voltaire sounded like a tour to the North 
 Pole. Smollett, in Humphrey Clinker, says the people 
 at the other end of the island knew as little of Scotland 
 as they did of Japan, nor was Charing Cross, witness as 
 it did the greatest height of c the tide of human exist- 
 ence,' then bright with the autumnal trips of circular 
 tours and Macbrayne steamers. The feeling for scenery, 
 besides, was in its infancy, nor was it scenery but men 
 and manners that were sought by our two travellers, to 
 
94 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 whom what would now be styled the Wordsworthian 
 feeling had little or no interest. Gibbon has none of 
 it, and Johnston laughed at Shenstone for not caring 
 whether his woods and streams had anything good to 
 eat in them, 'as if one could fill one's belly with 
 hearing soft murmurs or looking at rough cascades. ' 
 Fleet Street to him was more delicious than Tempe, 
 and the bare scent of the pastoral draws an angry snort 
 from the critic. Boswell, in turn, confesses to no relish 
 for nature; he admits he has no pencil for visible 
 objects, but only for varieties of mind and esprit. The 
 Critical Review congratulated the public on a fortunate 
 event in the annals of literature for the following 
 account in Johnson's Journey ' I sat down on a bank, 
 such as a writer of romance might have delighted to 
 feign. I had, indeed, no trees to whisper over my head 
 but a clear rivulet streamed at my feet. The day was 
 calm, the air soft, and all was rudeness, silence and 
 solitude. Before me, and on either side, were high 
 hills, which, if hindering the eye from ranging, forced 
 the mind to find entertainment for itself/ This, little 
 more than the reflections of a Cockney on a hayrick, is 
 as far as the eighteenth century could go, nor need we 
 wonder that the Rambler's moralizing at lona struck so 
 much Sir Joseph Banks, the President of the Royal 
 Society, that he 'clasped his hands together, and 
 remained for some time in an attitude of silent admira- 
 tion/ Burns himself, as Prof. Veitch has rightly 
 indicated, has little of the later feeling and regards 
 barren nature with the unfavourable eyes of the farmer 
 and the practical agriculturist, nor has the travelled 
 Goldsmith more to shew. Writing from Edinburgh, he 
 laments that 'no grove or brook lend their music to 
 cheer the stranger,' while at Ley den, 'wherever I 
 turned my eye, fine houses, elegant gardens, statues, 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 95 
 
 grottoes, presented themselves.' Even Gray found that 
 Mount Cenis carried the permission mountains have of 
 being frightful rather too far, and Wordsworth and 
 Shelley would have resented the Johnsonian description 
 of a Highland Ben as 'a considerable protuberance.' 
 Indeed, Goldsmith's bare mention of that object, so 
 dear to Pope and his century, ' grottoes ' reminds us 
 we are not yet in the modern world. Yet the boldness 
 of the sage, and the cheerfulness of Boswell, carried 
 them through it all. c I should/ wrote the doctor to 
 Mrs Thrale, * have been very sorry to have missed any 
 of the inconveniences, to have had more light or less 
 rain, for their co-operation crowded the scene and filled 
 the mind.' 
 
 Crossing the Firth, after landing on Inchkeith, they 
 arrived at St Andrews which had long been an object of 
 interest to Johnson. They passed Leuchars, Dundee, 
 and Aberbrothick. The ruins of ecclesiastical magnifi- 
 cence would seem to have touched a hidden chord in 
 Bos well's past, for we find him on the road talking of 
 the * Roman Catholick faith,' and leading his companion 
 on transubstantiation ; but this, being ' an awful subject, 
 I did not then press Dr Johnson upon it.' Montrose 
 was reached, and at the inn the waiter was called 
 ' rascal' by the Rambler for putting sugar into the 
 lemonade with his fingers, to the delight of Bozzy who 
 rallied him into quietness by the assurance that the 
 landlord was an Englishman. Monboddo was then 
 passed, where ' the magnetism of his conversation drew 
 us out of our way,' though the prompt action of Boswell 
 as agent in advance really was the source of their invita- 
 tion. Burnet was one of the best scholars in Scotland, and 
 * Johnson and my lord spoke highly of Homer.' All 
 his paradoxes about the superiority of the ancients, the 
 existence of men with tails, slavery and other institutions 
 
96 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 were vented, but all went well. The decrease of learning 
 in England, which Johnson lamented, was met by 
 Monboddo's belief in its extinction in Scotland, but 
 Bozzy, as the old High School of Edinburgh boy, put 
 in a word for that place of education and brought him 
 to confess that it did well. 
 
 The New Inn at Aberdeen was full. But the waiter 
 knew Boswell by his likeness to his father who put up 
 here on circuit the only portrait, we believe, there is 
 of Lord Auchinleck and accommodation was provided. 
 They visited King's College, where Boswell ' stepped 
 into the chapel and looked at the tomb of its founder, 
 Bishop Elphinstone, of whom I shall have occasion to 
 write in my history of James IV., the patron of my 
 family/ The freedom of the city was conferred on 
 Johnson. Was this an honour, or an excuse for a 
 social glass among the civic Solons of an unreformed 
 corporation? The latter may be the case, when we 
 reflect that none of the four universities thought of 
 giving him an honorary degree, though Beattie at this 
 time had received the doctorate in laws from Oxford, 
 and Gray some years before this had declined the offer 
 from Aberdeen. Nor can we forget the taunt of George 
 Colman the younger about Pangloss in his Heir at Law, 
 and his own recollection how, when a lad at King's 
 College, he had been c scarcely a week in Old Aberdeen 
 when the Lord Provost of the New Town invited me to 
 drink wine with him, one evening in the Town Hall ; ' 
 and presented him on October 8th, 1781, with the 
 freedom of the city. No negative inference can be 
 established from the contemporary notices in the 
 Aberdeen Journal over the visit. Every paragraph is 
 contemptuous in its tone; and till October 4th no 
 notice is taken of the honour, when ' a correspondent 
 says he is glad to find that the city of Aberdeen has 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 97 
 
 presented Dr Johnson with the freedom of that place, 
 for he has sold his freedom on this side of the Tweed 
 for a pension.' The definition of oats in the Dictionary 
 is brought up against its author, and Bozzy is also 
 attacked in a doggerel epigram on his Corsican Tour 
 and his system of spelling. But the doctor easily 
 maintained his conversational supremacy over his 
 academic hosts, who 'started not a single mawkin for 
 us to pursue. 7 
 
 Ellon, Slains Castle, and Elgin were visited. They 
 passed Gordon Castle at Fochabers, drove over the 
 heath where Macbeth met the witches, ' classic ground 
 to an Englishman/ as the old editor of Shakespeare 
 felt, and reached Nairn, where now they heard for the 
 first time the Gaelic tongue, * one of the songs of 
 Ossian/ quoth the justly incredulous doctor, and saw 
 peat fires. At Fort George they were welcomed by Sir 
 Eyre Coote. The old military aspirations of Bozzy 
 flared up and were soothed : ' for a little while I 
 fancied myself a military man, and it pleased me. 7 As 
 they left, the commander reminded them of the hard- 
 ships by the way, in return as Boswell interposed for 
 the rough things Johnson had said of Scotland. ' You 
 must change your name, sir/ said Sir Eyre. 'Ay, to 
 Dr M'Gregor/ replied Bozzy. The notion of the lexico- 
 grapher's assuming the forbidden name of the bold 
 outlaw, with ' his foot upon his native heath/ is rather 
 comic, though later on we find him striding about with 
 a target and broad sword, and a bonnet drawn over his 
 wig ! Though both professed profuse addiction to 
 Jacobite sentiments, it is curious no mention is made 
 of Culloden. It may be that Boswell, who some days 
 later weeps over the battle, may have diplomatically 
 avoided it, or it may have been dark as their chaise 
 passed it, though it is not impossible that Boswell, 
 
 o 
 
98 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 who at St Andrews had not known where to look 
 for John Knox's grave, and has no mention of Airs- 
 moss where Cameron fell in his own parish of 
 Auchinleck, was ignorant of the site. From their 
 inn at Inverness he wrote to Garrick gleefully over his 
 tour with Davy's old preceptor, and then begged per- 
 mission to leave Johnson for a time, 'that I might 
 run about and pay some visits to several good people,' 
 finding much satisfaction in hearing every one speak 
 well of his father. 
 
 On Monday, August 30, they began their equitation ; 
 ' I would needs make a word too. 7 They took horses 
 now, a third carried his man Ritter, and a fourth their 
 portmanteaus. The scene by Loch Ness was new to 
 the sage, and he rises in his narrative a little to it and 
 the 'limpid waters beating their bank, and waving their 
 surface by a gentle agitation/ Through Glenshiel, Glen- 
 morison, Auchnasheal, they passed on to the inn at 
 Glenelg. They made beds for themselves with fresh 
 hay, and, like Wolfe at Quebec, they had their 'choice 
 of difficulties ; ' but the philosophic Rambler maintained 
 they might have been worse on the hillside, and 
 buttoning himself up in his greatcoat he lay down, 
 while Boswell had his sheets spread on the hay, 
 and his clothes and greatcoat laid over him by way 
 of blankets. 
 
 Next day they got into a boat for Skye, reaching 
 Armidale before one. Here occurred one of the dramatic 
 episodes of the book. Sir Alexander Macdonald, 
 husband of BoswelPs Yorkshire cousin Miss Bosville, 
 and the host at the masquerade in February, was on 
 his way to Edinburgh, and met them at the house of 
 a tenant, ' as we believe/ wrote Johnson to Mrs Thrale, 
 ' that he might with less reproach entertain us meanly. 
 Boswell was very angry, and reproached him with his 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 99 
 
 improper parsimony. Boswell has some thoughts of 
 collecting the stones and making a novel of his life.' 
 In the first edition of his book something strong had 
 clearly been written, but it was wisely suppressed at the 
 last moment when the book was bound, for the new 
 pages are but clumsily pasted on the guard between 
 leaves 166 and 169. The first edition had accord- 
 ingly this account, which was even toned down in the 
 next. 
 
 'Instead of finding the head of the Macdonalds 
 surrounded with his clan, and a festive entertainment, 
 we had a small company and cannot boast of our cheer. 
 The particulars are minuted in my journal, but I shall 
 not trouble the publick with them. I shall mention 
 but one characteristick circumstance. My shrewd and 
 hearty friend, Sir Thomas Blackett, Lady Macdonald's 
 uncle, who had preceded us in a visit to this chief, 
 upon being asked by him if the punchbowl then upon 
 the table was not a very handsome one, replied, " Yes, 
 if it were full." Sir Alexander, having been an Eton 
 scholar, Dr Johnson had formed an opinion of him 
 which was much diminished when he beheld him in the 
 Isle of Sky, where we heard heavy complaints of rents 
 racked, and the people driven to emigration. Dr 
 Johnson said, " it grieves me to see the chief of a great 
 clan appear to such disadvantage. The gentleman 
 has talents, nay, some learning ; but he is totally unfit 
 for his situation. Sir, the Highland chiefs should not 
 be allowed to go further south than Aberdeen." I 
 meditated an escape from this the very next day, but 
 Dr Johnson resolved that we should weather it out till 
 Monday.' 
 
 Next day being Sunday Bozzy's spirits were cheered 
 by the climate and the weather, but ' had I not had Dr 
 Johnson to contemplate, I should have been sunk into 
 
ioo FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 dejection, but his firmness supported me. I looked at 
 him as a man whose head is turning giddy at sea looks 
 at a rock/ Everywhere they met signs of the parting 
 of the ways in the Highlands. The old days of feudal 
 power were merging in the industrial, the chiefs were 
 now landlords and exacting ones. Emigration was rife, 
 and the pages of the Scots Magazine of the time dwell 
 much on this. A month before, four hundred men had 
 left Strathglass and Glengarry ; in June eight hundred 
 had sailed from Stornoway ; Lochaber sent four hundred, 
 'the finest set of fellows in the Highlands, carrying 
 ;6ooo in ready cash with them. The extravagant rents 
 exacted by the landlords is the sole cause given for this 
 emigration which seems to be only in its infancy/ The 
 high price of provisions and the decrease of the linen 
 trade in the north of Ireland sent eight hundred this 
 year from Stromness, when we find the linen dealers 
 thanking BoswelPs old rival, as he supposed, with Miss 
 Blair, Sir Alexander Gilmour, M.P. for Midlothian, for 
 his efforts at providing better legislation. 
 
 Rasay is one of the happiest descriptions in the tour. 
 * This/ said Johnson, ' is truly the patriarchal life ; this 
 is what we came to find.' They heard from home and 
 had letters. At Kingsburgh they were welcomed by the 
 lady of the house, ' the celebrated Miss Flora Macdonald, 
 a little woman of genteel appearance ; and uncommonly 
 mild and well-bred.' * I was in a cordial humour, and 
 promoted a cheerful glass. Honest Mr M'Queen 
 observed that I was in high glee, " my governor being 
 gone to bed." . . . The room where we lay was a 
 celebrated one. Dr Johnson's bed was the very bed in 
 which the grandson of the unfortunate King James the 
 Second lay, on one of the nights after the failure of his ' 
 rash attempt in 1745-6. To see Dr Samuel Johnson 
 lying in that bed, in the Isle of Sky, in the house of 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 101 
 
 Miss Flora Macdonald, struck me with such a group of 
 ideas as it is not easy for words to describe, as they 
 passed through the mind. The room was decorated 
 with a great variety of maps and prints. Among others, 
 was Hogarth's print of Wilkes grinning, with a cap of 
 liberty on a pole by him/ Certainly Bozzy had never 
 thought of finding a remembrance of his ' classic friend ' 
 in such circumstances. 
 
 Dunvegan and the castle of the Macleods received 
 them in hospitable style. * Boswell,' said Johnson, in 
 allusion to Sir Alexander's stinted ways, c we came in at 
 the wrong end of the island ; ' the memories of their visit 
 had not been forgotten when Scott was there on his 
 Lighthouse Tour in 1814. The Rambler ' had tasted 
 lotus, and was in danger of forgetting he was ever to 
 depart.' 
 
 Landing at Strolimus, they proceeded to Corricha- 
 tachin, 'with but a single star to light us on our way.' 
 There took place the scene that, though familiar, must 
 be given in the writer's own words. A man who, for 
 artistic setting and colour, could write it deliberately 
 down even to his own disadvantage, and who could 
 appeal to serious critics and readers of discernment and 
 taste against the objections which he saw himself would 
 be raised from the misinterpretation of others, is a figure 
 not to be met with every day in literature. 
 
 * Dr Johnson went to bed soon. When one bowl of punch was 
 finished, I rose, and was near the door, on my way upstairs to bed ; 
 but Corrichatachin said, it was the first time Col had been in his 
 house, and he should have his bowl ; and would not I join in drink- 
 ing it? The heartiness of my honest landlord, and the desire of 
 doing social honour to our very obliging conductor, induced me to 
 sit down again. Col's bowl was finished ; and by that time we 
 were well warmed. A third bowl was soon made, and that too was 
 finished. We were cordial, and merry to a high degree ; but of 
 
102 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 what passed I have no recollection, with any accuracy. I remember 
 calling Corrichatachin by the familiar appellation of Corri which 
 his friends do. A fourth bowl was made, by which time Col, and 
 young M'Kinnon, Corrichatachin's son, slipped away to bed. I 
 continued a little time with Corri and Knockow ; but at last I left 
 them. It was near five in the morning when I got to bed. Sunday -, 
 September 26. I awaked at noon with a severe head-ach. I was 
 much vexed that I should have been guilty of such a riot, and afraid 
 of a reproof from Dr Johnson, I thought it very inconsistent with 
 that conduct which I ought to maintain, while the companion of the 
 Rambler. About one he came into my room, and accosted me, 
 " What, drunk yet ?" His tone of voice was not that of severe upbraid- 
 ing ; so I was relieved a little. " Sir," (said I), " they kept me up." 
 He answered, "No, you kept them up, you drunken dog : " this 
 he said with good-humoured English pleasantry. Soon afterwards, 
 Corrichatachin, Col, and other friends assembled round my bed. 
 Corri had a brandy bottle and glass with him, and insisted I should 
 take a dram. u Ay," said Dr Johnson, " fill him drunk again. Do 
 it in the morning, that we may laugh at him all day. It is a poor 
 thing for a fellow to get drunk at night, and skulk to bed, and let 
 his friends have no sport." Finding him thus jocular, I became quite 
 easy ; and when I offered to get up, he very good naturedly said, 
 " You need be in no such hurry now. " I took my host's advice, and 
 drank some brandy, which I found an effectual cure for my head- 
 ach. When I rose, I went into Dr Johnson's room, and taking up 
 Mrs M'Kinnon's Prayer-Book, I opened it at the twentieth Sunday 
 after Trinity, in the epistle for which I read, " And be not drunk 
 with wine, wherein there is excess." Some would have taken this 
 as a divine interposition. 1 
 
 Such is the extraordinary confession. St Augustine, 
 Rousseau, De Quincey, have not quite equalled this. 
 He found it had been made the subject of serious criti- 
 cism and ludicrous banter. But his one object, as he 
 tells * serious criticks,' has been to delineate Johnson's 
 character, and for this purpose he appeals from Philip 
 drunk to Philip sober, and to the approbation of the 
 discerning reader. Later on, he has laid the flattering 
 
JAMES BOSWELL io$ 
 
 unction to his heart, and has extracted comfort from the 
 soul of things evil. He felt comfortable, and ' I then 
 thought that my last night's riot was no more than 
 such a social excess as may happen without much 
 moral blame; and recollected that some physicians 
 maintained, that a fever produced by it was, upon the 
 whole, good for health : so different are our reflections 
 on the same subject, at different periods; and such 
 the excuses with which we palliate what we know to 
 be wrong.' 
 
 Leaving Skye, they ran before the wind to Col. 
 
 * It was very dark, and there was a heavy and incessant rain. 
 The sparks of the burning peat flew so much about, that I dreaded 
 the vessel might take fire. Then as Col was a sportsman, and had 
 powder on board, I figured that we might be blown up. Our 
 vessel often lay so much on one side, that I trembled lest she should 
 be overset, and indeed they told me afterwards that they had run 
 her sometimes to within an inch of the water, so anxious were they 
 to make what haste they could before the night should be worse. 
 I now saw what I never saw before, a prodigious sea, with immense 
 billows coming upon a vessel, so that it seemed hardly possible to 
 escape. I am glad I have seen it once. I endeavoured to compose 
 my mind ; when I thought of those who were dearest to me, and 
 would suffer severely, should I be lost, I upbraided myself. Piety 
 afforded me comfort ; yet I was disturbed by the objections that 
 have been made against a particular providence, and by the argu- 
 ments of those who maintain that it is in vain to hope that the 
 petitions of an individual, or even of congregations, can have any 
 influence with the Deity. I asked Col with much earnestness what 
 I could do. He with a happy readiness put into my hand a rope, 
 which was fixed to the top of one of the masts, and told me to hold 
 it till he bade me pull. If I had considered the matter, I might 
 have seen that this could not be of the slightest service ; but his 
 object was to keep me out of the way. . . . Thus did I stand firm 
 to my post, while the wind and rain beat upon me, always expecting 
 a call to pull my rope. . . . They spied the harbour of Lochiern, 
 and Col cried, "Thank God, we are safe 1" Dr Johnson had all 
 
FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 this time been quiet and unconcerned. He had lain down on one 
 of the beds, and having got free from sickness, was satisfied. The 
 truth is, he knew nothing of the danger we were in. Once he asked 
 whither we were going ; upon being told that it was not certain 
 whether to Mull or Col, he cried, " Col for my money ! " I now 
 went down to visit him. He was lying in philosophick tranquillity, 
 with a greyhound of CoFs at his back keeping him warm/ 
 
 Mull, Tobermory, Ulva's Isle, and Inch Kenneth 
 followed. Then lona, 'the sacred place which as 
 long as I can remember, I had thought on with venera- 
 tion.' The two friends, as they landed on the island, 
 * cordially embraced/ as they had done in the White 
 Horse at Edinburgh, and the mark of feeling is a note 
 that we are yet with them in the eighteenth century. 
 They lay in a bam with a portmanteau for a pillow, and 
 1 when I awaked in the morning and looked round me, 
 I could not help smiling at the idea of the chief of the 
 Macleans, the great English moralist, and myself lying 
 thus extended in such a situation.' The old Boswell 
 of the Roman Catholic days appears at this time. 
 ' Boswell,' writes Johnson to Mrs Thrale, ' who is very 
 pious went into the chapel at night to perform his 
 devotions, but came back in haste for fear of spectres.' 
 Second sight was often in their thoughts and conversa- 
 tion on their tour ; at the club Colman had jocularly 
 to bid Boswell ' cork it up ' when he was too full of his 
 belief on the point. His fear of ghosts reminds one 
 of Pepys in the year of the great plague, as he went 
 through the graveyard of the church, with the bodies 
 buried thick and high, ' frighted and much troubled.' 
 
 * I left him,' says Boswell himself, ' and Sir Allan at 
 breakfast in our barn, and stole back again to the 
 cathedral, to indulge in solitude and devout meditation. 
 When contemplating the venerable ruins, / reflected 
 with much satisfaction, that the solemn scenes of piety 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 105 
 
 never lose their sanctity and influence, though the cares 
 and follies of life may prevent us from visiting them. 
 ... I hoped that, ever after having been in this 
 holy place, I should maintain an exemplary conduct. 
 One has a strange propensity to fix upon some point 
 of time from whence a better course of life may begin.' 
 This is a revelation of the inner Boswell. On the eve 
 of the appearance of the Tour in Corsica^ he had written 
 to Temple, about c fixing some period for my perfection 
 as far as possible. Let it be when my account of 
 Corsica is finished. I shall then have a character to 
 support/ On landing at Rasay, he noticed the remains 
 of a cross on the rock, ' which had to me a pleasing 
 vestige of religion/ and he 'could not but value the 
 family seat more for having even the ruins of a chapel 
 close to it. There was something comforting in the 
 thought of being so near a piece of consecrated ground.' 
 Oban received them with a tolerable inn. They 
 were again on the mainland, and found papers with 
 conjectures as to their motions in the islands. Next 
 day they spent at Inverary. The castle of the Duke of 
 Argyll was near, and now, for the first time on the tour, 
 the indefatigable agent in advance was completely non- 
 plussed. The spectre of the great Douglas Trial loomed 
 large in the eyes of the pamphleteer and the hero of the 
 riot. He had reason, he says, to fear hostile reprisals 
 on the part of the Duchess, who had been Duchess of 
 Hamilton and mother of the rival claimant, before she 
 had become the wife of John, fifth Duke of Argyll. It 
 is from this scene and from the Stratford Jubilee fiasco 
 that the general reader draws his picture of poor Bozzy, 
 and the belief remains that James Boswell was a pushing 
 and forward interloper, half mountebank and half show- 
 man. Read in the original, as a revelation of the 
 writer's character, the very reverse is the impression; 
 
106 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 he is there presented not in any ludicrous light but 
 rather in a good-humoured and fussy way. He met his 
 friend the Rev. John Macaulay, one of the ministers of 
 Inverary, who accompanied them to the castle, where 
 Boswell presented the doctor to the Duke. ' I shall 
 never forget,' quaintly adds the chronicler, ' the impres- 
 sion made upon my fancy by some of the ladies' maids 
 tripping about in neat morning dresses. After seeing for 
 a long time little but rusticity, their lively manner, and 
 gay inviting appearance, pleased me so much, that I 
 thought, for a moment, I could have been a knight- 
 errant for them.' This grandfather of the historian 
 and essayist, the man who has dealt the heaviest blow 
 to the reputation of poor Bozzy, was to encounter 
 some warm retorts from the Rambler like his brother, 
 Macaulay's grand-uncle, the minister at Calder. Mr 
 Trevelyan is eager for the good name of his family, and 
 finds it impossible to suppress a wish that the great 
 talker had been there to avenge them. It may not 
 be quite impossible that, mingling with the brilliant 
 essayist's ill-will to the politics of the travellers, there 
 was an unconscious strain of resentment at the con- 
 temptuous way in which his relations had been tossed 
 by the doctor, and that Bozzy's own subsequent denun- 
 ciations of the abolitionists and the slave trade had 
 edged the memories in the mind of the son of Zachary 
 Macaulay. Be this as it may, for this scene Macaulay 
 has a keen eye, and as much of his colour is derived 
 from it, it is but right that in some abridged form the 
 incident be set down here in BoswelPs own words 
 
 1 1 went to the castle just about the time when I supposed the 
 ladies would be retired from dinner. I sent in my name ; and, 
 being shewn in, found the amiable Duke sitting at the head of his 
 table with several gentlemen. I was most politely received, and 
 gave his grace some particulars of the curious journey which I had 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 107 
 
 been making with Dr Johnson. ... As I was going away, the 
 Duke said, * ' Mr Eoswell, won't you have some tea ? " I thought 
 it best to get over the meeting with the Duchess this night ; so 
 respectfully agreed. I was conducted to the drawing-room by the 
 Duke, who announced my name ; but the duchess, who was sitting 
 with her daughter, Lady Betty Hamilton, and some other ladies, 
 took not the least notice of me. I should have been mortified at 
 being thus coldly received, had I not been consoled by the obliging 
 attention of the Duke. 
 
 ' Monday, October 25. I presented Dr Johnson to the Duke of 
 Argyll. . . . the duke placed Dr Johnson next himself at table. 
 I was in fine spirits ; and though sensible of not being in favour 
 with the duchess, I was not in the least disconcerted, and offered 
 her grace some of the dish that was before me. It must be owned 
 that I was in the right to be quite unconcerned, if I could. I was 
 the Duke of Argyll's guest ; and I had no reason to suppose that 
 he adopted the prejudices and resentments of the Duchess of 
 Hamilton. 
 
 * I knew it was the rule of modern high life not to drink to any- 
 body ; but, that I might have the satisfaction for once to look the 
 duchess in the face, with a glass in my hand, I with a respectful air 
 addressed her, " My Lady Duchess, I have the honour to drink 
 your grace's good health." I repeated the words audibly, and with 
 a steady countenance. This was, perhaps, rather too much ; but 
 some allowance must be made for human feelings. I made some 
 remark that seemed to imply a belief in second sight. The duchess 
 said, " I fancy you will be a methodist" This was the only sen- 
 tence her grace deigned to utter to me ; and I take it for granted, 
 she thought it a good hit on my credulity in the Douglas Cause. 
 
 'We went to tea. The duke and I walked up and down the 
 drawing-room, conversing. The duchess still continued to shew 
 the same marked coldness for me ; for which, though I suffered 
 from it, I made every allowance, considering the very warm part 
 that I had taken for Douglas, in the cause in which she thought 
 her son deeply interested. Had not her grace discovered some 
 displeasure towards me, I should have suspected her of insensibility 
 or dissimulation. Her grace made Dr Johnson come and sit by 
 her, and asked him why he made his journey so late in the year. 
 "Why, madam (said he), you know Mr Boswell must attend the 
 
io8 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Court of Session, and it does not rise till the 1 2th of August." 
 She said, with some sharpness, " I know nothing vi Mr Boswell." 
 Poor Lady Lucy Douglas, to whom I mentioned this, observed, 
 " She knew too mtich of Mr Boswell." I shall make no remark on 
 her grace's speech, etc., etc.* 
 
 In all this scene it will be confessed there is nothing 
 but rudeness on the part of the duchess, one of the 
 beautiful Gunnings, intentional or otherwise, while the 
 kindly touches on BoswelPs part, his allowance for her 
 supposed feelings over the trial, and his determination, 
 for once, to look a duchess in the face, are admirable. 
 Bozzy was by birth a gentleman, and there is not the 
 slightest indication here of any want of breeding or taste 
 on his side. 
 
 At Dumbarton, steep as is the incline, Johnson as- 
 cended it. The Saraceris Head, which had welcomed 
 Paoli before now, received the travellers. There was now 
 no more sullen fuel or peat. ' Here am I,' soliloquized 
 the Rambler, with a leg upon each side of the grate, 
 'an Englishman, sitting by a coal fire.' 
 
 ' Jamie's aff the hooks noo ; ' said the old laird, as 
 they drew near Auchinleck, 'he's bringing doon an 
 auld dominie.' Boswell begged of his companion to 
 avoid three topics of discourse on which he knew his 
 father had fixed opinions Whiggism, Presbyterianism, 
 and Sir John Pringle. For a time all went well. They 
 walked about 'the romantick groves of my ancestors,' 
 and Bozzy discoursed on the antiquity and honourable 
 alliances of the family, and on the merits of its founder, 
 Thomas, who fell with King James at Flodden. But 
 the storm broke, over the judge's collection of medals, 
 where that of Oliver Cromwell brought up Charles the 
 First and Episcopacy. All must regret that the writer's 
 filial feelings withheld the 'interesting scene in this 
 dramatick sketch.' It is the one lacuna in the book. 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 109 
 
 Sir John Pringle, as the middle term in the debate, 
 came off without a bruise, but the honours lay with 
 Lord Auchinleck. The man whose f Scots strength of 
 sarcasm ' could retort on Johnson, that Cromwell was 
 a man that let kings know they ' had a lith in their 
 neck/ was likely to open new ideas to the doctor, 
 whose political opinions could not rank higher than 
 prejudices. 'Thus they parted,' says the son, after 
 his father had, with his dignified courtesy, seen Johnson 
 into the postchaise; 'they are now in a happier state 
 of existence, in a place where there is no room for 
 Whiggism? ' I have always said/ the doctor main- 
 tained, ' the first Whig was the Devil ! ' 
 
 Edinburgh was reached on November Qth. Eighty- 
 three days had passed since they left it, and for five 
 weeks no news of them had been heard. Writing from 
 London, on his arrival, Johnson said, ' I came home 
 last night, without any incommodity, danger, or weari- 
 ness, and am ready to begin a new journey. I know 
 Mrs Boswell wished me well to go.' The irregular 
 hours of her guest, and his habit of turning the candles 
 downward when they did not burn brightly, letting the 
 wax run upon the carpet, had not been quite to the taste 
 of the hostess, who resented, ' what was very natural to 
 a female mind/ the influence he possessed over the 
 actions of her husband. 
 
 We may well call this tour a spirited one, as Boswell 
 had styled his own Corsican expedition. No better 
 book of travels in Scotland has ever been written than 
 Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. The 
 accuracy of his description, his eye for scenes and 
 dramatic effects, have all been fully borne witness to 
 by those who have followed in their track, and the fact 
 of the book being day by day read by Johnson, during its 
 preparation, gives it an additional value from the perfect 
 
no FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 veracity of its contents ' as I have resolved that the 
 very journal which Dr Johnson read shall be presented 
 to the publick, I will not expand the text in any con- 
 siderable degree.' If the way in which the Rambler 
 roughed it, ' laughing to think of myself roving among 
 the Hebrides at sixty, and wondering where I shall rove 
 at four score,' is admirable, none the less so is Bozzy's 
 imperturbable good humour. * It is very convenient to 
 travel with him,' writes his companion from Auchinleck 
 to Mrs Thrale, ' for there is no house where he is not 
 received with kindness and respect. He has better 
 faculties than I had imagined ; more justness of dis- 
 cernment and more fecundity of images.' They had 
 hoped to go sailing from island to island, and had not 
 reckoned with what Scott, who wonders they were not 
 drowned, calls the proverbial carelessness of Hebridean 
 boatmen. They really had come two months too 
 late. But BoswelPs attention to the old man 
 smoothed all difficulties, 'looking on the tour as a 
 co-partnership between Dr Johnson and myself,' he did 
 his part faithfully, dancing reels, singing songs, and 
 airing the scraps of Gaelic he picked up, thinking all 
 this better than ' to play the abstract scholar.' 
 
 Johnson's account of the journey is an able perform- 
 ance, and is written with a lighter touch and grace than 
 is to be found in his early works. One passage from it 
 has become famous, his description of lona. 'The 
 man whose patriotism would not gain force upon the 
 plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow 
 warmer among the ruins of lona,' rivals Macaulay's 
 New Zealander as a stock quotation, and the whole 
 book is not without incisive touches. But it is com- 
 pletely eclipsed by the Journal of Boswell. From start 
 to finish there is not a dull page, and the literary 
 polish is, we venture to think, of a higher kind than is 
 
JAMES BOSWELL in 
 
 seen in the Life. The artistic opening, and the group- 
 ing of the characters, together with the wealth of 
 archaeological and historical information, the tripping 
 style and sustained interest, all render this book of 
 Boswell's a masterpiece. Johnson's account, published 
 in 1775, to k ten years to reach a second edition. 
 BoswelFs appeared in September, 1785; and by 
 December 20 the issue was exhausted, a third followed 
 on August 15, 1786, and the next year saw a German 
 translation issued at Lubeck. There had been grave 
 indiscretions, lack of reticence, and other faults in the 
 book. Caricatures were rife. Revising for the Second 
 Edition shewed Sir Alexander Macdonald seizing the 
 author by the throat, and pointing with his stick to the 
 open book, where two leaves are marked as torn out. 
 But Boswell, in The Gentlemaris Magazine for March 
 1786, asserts that no such applications or threats had 
 been made. The results, however, may have added to 
 the writer's unpopularity, as Lord Houghton suggests, 
 at the Edinburgh bar, through the answers, replies, and 
 other rejoinders to the strictures of Johnson, for which 
 Boswell, as the pioneer and the introducer of the 
 stranger, 'the chiel among them takin' notes/ may in 
 Edinburgh society have been held as mainly responsible. 
 To Johnson, the memories of the tour the lone 
 shieling and the misty island were a source of pleasing 
 recollection. Taken earlier, it would have removed 
 many of his insular prejudices by wider survey and 
 more varied conversation. 'The expedition to the 
 Hebrides,' he wrote to Boswell some years after, 'was 
 the most pleasant journey I ever made ; ' and two years 
 later, after restless and tedious nights, he is found 
 reverting to it and recalling the best night he had had 
 these twenty years back, at Fort Augustus. Yet all 
 through September they had not more than a day and a 
 
ii2 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 half of really good weather, and but the same during 
 October. Out of such slight materials and uncomfort- 
 able surroundings has Boswell produced a masterpiece 
 of descriptive writing. The memory of Johnson has 
 lingered where that of the Jacobite Pretender has well- 
 nigh completely passed away. Mr Gladstone, proposing 
 a Parliamentary vote of thanks to Lord Napier for 
 1 having planted the Standard of St George upon the 
 mountains of Rasselas;' Sir Robert Peel, quoting, in his 
 address to Glasgow University as Lord Rector, Johnson's 
 description of lona; Sir Walter Scott finding in Skye 
 that he and his friends had in their memories, as the 
 one typical association of the island, the ode to Mrs 
 Thrale, all combine to shew the abiding interest attach- 
 ing to the Rambler even in Abyssinia and to his foot- 
 steps in Scotland. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 EDINBURGH LIFE DEATH OF JOHNSON. 1773-1784 
 
 * My father used to protest I was born to be a strolling pedlar. ' 
 SIR WALTER SCOTT Autobiography. 
 
 1 You have done Auchinleck much honour and have, 
 I hope, overcome my father who has never forgiven 
 your warmth for monarchy and episcopacy. I am 
 anxious to see how your pages will operate on him.' 
 Boswell had good grounds for thus expressing himself to 
 Johnson over the publication of the latter's book. He 
 had not long, it would seem, to wait for the breaking of 
 the storm, as we find him writing to Temple in ominous 
 language. ' My father/ he says, ' is most unhappily 
 dissatisfied with me. He harps on my going over Scot- 
 land with a brute (think how shockingly erroneous !) 
 and wandering, or some such phrase, to London. I 
 always dread his making some bad settlement.' Then 
 the old judge would grimly relate how Lord Crichton, 
 son of the Earl of Dumfries, would go to Edinburgh, 
 and how, when he was carried back to the family vault, 
 the Earl, as he saw the hearse from the window, had 
 said, * Ay, ay, Charles, thou went without an errand : I 
 think thou hast got one to bring thee back again.' 
 
 But had the son chosen to be quite candid here, we 
 should see how just a cause the father had for his 
 displeasure. In the spring of 1774, he had written to 
 
 H "3 
 
FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Johnson suggesting a run up to London, expressing the 
 peculiar satisfaction which he felt in celebrating Easter 
 at St Paul's, which to his fancy was like going up to 
 Jerusalem at the feast of the Passover. The doctor was 
 wisely deaf to this subtle appeal. 'Edinburgh/ said 
 he, 'is not yet exhausted/ and reminded him that his 
 wife, having permitted him last year to ramble, had 
 now a claim upon him at home, while to come to lona or 
 to Jerusalem could not be necessary, though useful. 
 Next year, however, Boswell was in London, ' quite in my 
 old humour/ as he tells Temple, arguing with him for 
 concubinage and the plurality of the patriarchs, from all 
 which we may see that the plea urged to Johnson for 
 the visit was to be taken in a lax sense by Boswell, who 
 made his chief excuse out of some business at the bai 
 of the House over an election petition in Clackmannan. 
 He waited on Temple in Devon and shocked his host 
 by his inebriety, but ' under a solemn yew tree ' he had 
 vowed reformation. But his return to town, if it ' ex- 
 alted him in piety ' at St Paul's, seems to have led but 
 to fresh dissipation. He hints at ' Asiatic multiplicity/ 
 but this is only when he has taken too much claret. 
 The good resolutions at lona and the influence of the 
 ruins had passed away, the trip is extended to two 
 months, and he frets irritably over his old friend Henry 
 Dundas's election as King's Advocate, ' to be sure he 
 has strong parts, but he is a coarse unlettered dog.' 
 Harry Dundas at least was never found philandering as 
 we find Bozzy on this occasion, where the mixture of 
 religion and flirtation is so confusing. ' After breakfast- 
 ing with Paoli/ he writes before leaving for the north, 
 'and worshipping at St Paul's, I dined tite-a-tite with 
 my charming Mrs Stuart, of whom you have read in my 
 Journal. We dined in all the elegance of two courses 
 and a dessert, with dumb waiters, except when the second 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 115 
 
 course and the dessert were served. We talked with 
 unreserved freedom, as we had nothing to fear. We 
 were philosophical, upon honour not deep, but feeling, 
 we were pious ; we drank tea and bid each other adieu 
 as finely as romance paints. She is my wife's dearest 
 friend, so you see how beautiful our intimacy is.' But 
 from Johnson's letter to Mrs Thrale we see looming 
 ahead a crisis. ' He got two and forty guineas in fees 
 while he was here. He has by his wife 's persuasion and 
 mine taken down a present for his mother-in-law/ an 
 error, doubtless, for 'stepmother/ He had entered 
 himself this time at the Temple, and Johnson was his 
 bond. He left to be in time for practice before the 
 General Assembly, finding ' something low and coarse 
 in such employment, but guineas must be had' a 
 feeling quite different from that of Lord Cockburn who 
 thought the aisle of St Giles had seen the best work of 
 the best men in the kingdom since 1640. Perhaps his 
 feelings on this point were soothed by the traveller in 
 the coach, a Miss Silverton, an 'amiable creature who 
 has been in France. I can unite little fondnesses with 
 perfect conjugal love.' Alas for poor Peggie Mont- 
 gomerie, 'of the ancient house of Eglintoun,' blamed 
 by his father for not bridling the follies of his son, 
 waiting, doubtless, anxiously for the present to the 
 second wife of his father as a means of peace-offering ! 
 
 Then the secret leaks out that the father had refused 
 Boswell's plan of being allowed ^400 a year and the 
 trial of fortune at the London bar. His debts of ^1000 
 had been paid, and his allowance of ^300 threatened 
 with the reduction of a third. The promise under the 
 old yew had not been kept ; the one bottle of hock as 
 a statutory limit had been exceeded, he had been 
 'not drunk, but was intoxicated,' a subtle point for 
 bacchanalian casuists, and very ill next day. He lays 
 
n6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 it on the drunken habits of the country which, he says, 
 are very bad, and with the recollection of Burns' tempta- 
 tions in Dumfries we may admit that they were. His 
 father, too, was now about to entail his estate, and Bozzy's 
 predilection for feudal principles and heirs male brought 
 things to a deadlock. He appealed to Lord Hailes, 
 who admitted conscience and self formed a strong plea 
 when found on different sides. Finally, after the judge 
 had inserted in the deed his precautions against * a 
 weak, foolish and extravagant person/ the estate was 
 entailed on Boswell. * My father/ he tells Temple, 
 'is so different from me. We divaricate so much, as 
 Dr Johnson said. He has a method of treating me 
 which makes me feel like a timid boy, which to Boswell 
 (comprehending all that my character does in my own 
 imagination and in that of a wonderful number of man- 
 kind) is intolerable. It requires the utmost exertion of 
 practical philosophy to keep myself quiet ; but it has cost 
 me drinking a considerable quantity of strong beer to dull 
 my faculties.' The picture of the son drinking himself 
 down to the level of the father is truly inimitable ! 
 
 He feared the final settlement. He might be dis- 
 graced by his father, and not a shilling secured to his 
 wife and children. Then he is comforted by the 
 thought that his father is visibly failing, and he consults 
 his brother David with a view to a settlement, should 
 the succession pass to him. The birth of a son, who 
 was diplomatically called Alexander, was taken by the 
 old man as a compliment, and we find Boswell visiting 
 at Auchinleck, 'not long at one time, but frequent 
 renewals of attention are agreeable/ he finds, to his 
 father. He proposed to Johnson a tour round the 
 English cathedrals, but a brief trip with him to Derby- 
 shire was all that resulted. We now find for the first 
 time in the Life indications of what would ensue when 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 117 
 
 the strong hand of Johnson was removed from the 
 guidance of his weaker companion. * As we drove 
 back to Ashbourne,' he writes with curious frankness, 
 ' Dr Johnson recommended to me, as he had often done, 
 to drink water only,' and we meet with as curious a 
 defence of drinking the great difficulty of resisting it 
 when a good man asks you to drink the wine he has 
 had twenty years in his cellar ! Benevolence calls for 
 compliance, for, * curst be the spring] he adds with a 
 change of Pope's verse, 'how well soe'er it flow, that 
 tends to make one worthy man my foe ! ' 'I do/ he 
 wrote in the London Magazine for March 1780, 'fairly 
 acknowledge that I love drinking ; that I have a con- 
 stitutional inclination to indulge in fermented liquors, 
 and that if it were not for the restraints of reason and 
 religion, I am afraid that I should be as constant a 
 votary of Bacchus as any man. Drinking is in reality 
 an occupation which employs a considerable portion of 
 the time of many people; and to conduct it in the 
 most rational and agreeable manner is one of the great 
 arts of living. Were we so framed that it were possible 
 by perpetual supplies of wine to keep ourselves for ever 
 gay and happy, there could be no doubt that drinking 
 would be the summum bonum, the chief good to find 
 out which philosophers have been so variously busied/ 
 It looks as if poor Bozzy, when he wrote this, had 
 heard of the Brunonian system of medicine, and of the 
 unfortunate exemplication of it in practice and in pre- 
 cept by its founder in Edinburgh. No wonder such 
 excesses produced violent reaction to low spirits and 
 the 'black dog' of hypochondria. He finds it, after 
 going to prayers in Carlisle Cathedral, ' divinely cheer- 
 ing to have a cathedral so near Auchinleck,' one 
 hundred and fifty miles off, as Johnson sarcastically 
 replied. Bozzy had been writing a series of articles, 
 
 OF THK 
 
 (UNIVERSITY) 
 
n8 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 * The Hypochondriack,' in the London Magazine , for 
 about two years, but he was advised not to mention his 
 own mental diseases, or to expect for them either the 
 praise for which there was no room, or the pity which 
 would do him no good. The active old man was now 
 in better health than he had been upon the Hebridean 
 tour, and was in hopes of yet shewing himself with 
 Boswell in some part of Europe, Asia, or Africa. 
 'What have you to do with liberty and necessity?' 
 cries the doctor to his friend, who had been worrying 
 himself and his correspondent with philosophical ques- 
 tions, on which some six years before he had got 
 some light from the Lettres Persanes of Montesquieu. 
 ' Come to me, my dear Bozzy, and let us be as happy 
 as we can. We will go again to the Mitre, and talk old 
 times over. 1 Thrice during the 1781 visit to London 
 do we see his unfortunate habits breaking out; and, 
 when we find him saying he has unfortunately preserved 
 none of the conversations, Miss Hannah More, who 
 met him that day at the Bishop of St Asaph's, explains 
 it ' I was heartily disgusted with Mr Boswell, who 
 came upstairs after dinner much disordered with wine/ 
 
 Let us hear his own confession over his conduct at 
 the house of Lady Galway. 
 
 ' Another evening Johnson's kind indulgence towards 
 me had a pretty difficult trial. I had dined at the Duke 
 of Montrose's with a very agreeable party, and his Grace, 
 according to his usual custom, had circulated the bottle 
 very freely. Lord Graham and I went together to 
 Miss Monckton's where I certainly was in extraordinary 
 spirits, and above all fear or awe. In the midst of a 
 great number of persons of the first rank, amongst 
 whom I recollect with confusion a noble lady of the 
 most stately decorum, I placed myself next to Johnson, 
 and thinking myself now fully his match, talked to him 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 119 
 
 in a loud and boisterous manner, desirous to let the com- 
 pany know how I could contend with Ajax. I particularly 
 remember pressing him upon the value of the pleasures 
 of the imagination, and, as an illustration of my argu- 
 ment, asking him, "What, sir, suppose I were to fancy 
 that the (naming the most charming Duchess in his 
 Majesty's dominions) were in love with me, should I not 
 be very happy ? " My friend with much address evaded 
 my interrogatories, and kept me as quiet as possible, 
 but it may be easily conceived how he must have felt.' 
 
 His father was now dying, and a London trip, which 
 had been planned by Boswell for 1782, found the son 
 at the very limit of his credit. ' If you anticipate your 
 inheritance,' he was reminded, * you can at last inherit 
 nothing. Poverty (added the old impransus Johnson, 
 out of the depths of his own experience), my friend, is 
 so great an evil that I cannot but earnestly enjoin you 
 to avoid it. Live on what you have ; live, if you can, 
 on less.' Lord Auchinleck died suddenly at Edinburgh, 
 on August 3oth, 1782; and it was unfortunate for 
 Bozzy that neither at the death of his father nor of his 
 mother, nor, as we shall see of Johnson, was he present. 
 The evening of the old man's days had been, we 
 are assured by Ramsay of Ochtertyre, clouded by the 
 follies and eccentricities of his son. For thirty years 
 he had been sorely tried ; twice he had paid his debts, 
 he had indulged him with a foreign tour, had provided 
 him with every means of securing professional success 
 at the bar, only to see that son do everything to miss 
 it and become everything his father hated in life a 
 Tory, an Anglican, and a Jacobite. The new laird was 
 anxious to display himself on a wider sphere. Johnson 
 was now visibly failing, and was glad of someone to lean 
 upon for little attentions. ' Boswell,' he said, * I think 
 I am easier with you than with almost anybody. Get 
 
120 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 as much force of mind as you can. Let your imports 
 be more than your exports, and you'll never go far 
 wrong. 7 He reverted to the old days of the tour in 
 a hopeful strain : ' I should like to come and have a 
 cottage in your park, toddle about, live mostly on milk, 
 and be taken care of by Mrs Boswell. She and I are 
 good friends now, are we not ? ' 
 
 In 1783 Boswell appeared before the public with a 
 Letter to the People of Scotland. It was on Fox's proposed 
 bill to regulate the affairs of the East India Company. 
 Against it he stands forth, 'as an ancient and faithful 
 Briton, holding an estate transmitted to him by charters 
 from a series of kings.' Guardedly Johnson admitted 
 that 'your paper contains very considerable knowledge 
 of history and of the constitution : it will certainly raise 
 your character, though perhaps it may not make you a 
 minister of state.' A copy to Pitt elicited the formal 
 acceptance of thanks, but the exclusion of the bill 
 Boswell took as proof of his own advocacy. He stood 
 for Ayrshire, turning back from York when the dissolu- 
 tion was announced. ' Our Boswell,' wrote the doctor 
 to Langton, ' is now said to stand for some place. 
 Whether to wish him success his best friends hesitate.' 
 
 May found him with the Rambler for the last time. 
 ' I intend,' he writes to Dr Percy, ' to be in London 
 about the end of this month, chiefly to attend upon Dr 
 Johnson with respectful affection. He has for some 
 time been very ill with dropsical asthmatical complaints, 
 which at his age are very alarming. I wish to publish 
 as a regale to him a neat little volume The Praises of 
 Doctor Samuel Johnson^ by co-temporary writers. Will 
 your lordship take the trouble to send me a note of the 
 writers who have praised our much respected friend?' 
 The attentive Bozzy had written to all the leading men 
 in the Edinburgh School of Medicine Cullen, Hope, 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 121 
 
 Monro, and others. With the expectation that an increase 
 of Johnson's pension would enable him to visit Italy, he 
 consulted Sir Joshua Reynolds, and, with his approval, 
 wrote to Thurlow the Chancellor. At the house of the 
 painter they dined for the last time. 
 
 'I accompanied him in Sir Joshua Reynolds's coach, to the entry 
 of Bolt Court. He asked me whether I would not go with him to 
 his house ; I declined it, from an apprehension that my spirits 
 would sink. We bade adieu to each other affectionately in the 
 carriage. When he had got down upon the foot-pavement he 
 called out, "Fare you well; 1 ' and, without looking back, sprung 
 away with a kind of pathetick briskness, if I may use that expression, 
 which seemed to indicate a struggle to conceal uneasiness, and im- 
 pressed me with a foreboding of our long, long separation.' 
 
 We think of the dying Cervantes, and the student- 
 admirer of the All Famous and the Joy of the Muses 
 * parting at the Toledo bridge, he turning aside to take 
 the road to Segovia/ 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE ENGLISH BAR DEATH. 1784-1795 
 
 'Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.' JULIUS CESAR, iii. 2. 
 
 THERE is something unsatisfactory in the fact that 
 Boswell was not with Johnson as he died. It gives to 
 his book an air of something distinctly lacking, which 
 is not with us as we close Lockhart's Life of Scott. His 
 own account is that he was indisposed during a con- 
 siderable part of the year, which may, or may not, be a 
 euphemism for irregular habits ; yet, when we consider 
 how easily he might have been with his old friend, we 
 must own to a feeling that Bosweirs mere satisfaction 
 at learning he was spoken of with affection by Johnson 
 at the close does not satisfy the nature of things or the 
 artistic sense of fitness. No literary executor had been 
 appointed, and the materials for a biography had been 
 mostly destroyed by Johnson's orders. This, we may be 
 sure, had not been expected by Boswell, who set himself, 
 however, to prepare for the press his own Journal of 'a 
 Tour to the Hebrides^ which his friend when alive had not 
 been willing to see appear as a pendant to the Journey. 
 ' Between ourselves/ he tells Temple, ' he is not apt to 
 encourage one to share reputation with him.' Yet he 
 felt, as he wrote to Percy on 2oth March 1785, that it 
 was a great consolation to him now that he had, as it 
 was, collected so much of the wit and the wisdom of 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 123 
 
 that wonderful man. ' I do not expect/ he adds, ' to 
 recover from it. I gaze after him with an eager eye ; 
 and I hope again to be with him/ 
 
 Now that the strong hand of Johnson was removed, 
 'and the light of his life as if gone out/ the rest of 
 BoswelPs life was but a downward course. He struggles 
 with himself, and feels instinctively the lack of the curb 
 which the powerful intellect of the Rambler had held 
 on the weaker character of the other. We find him re- 
 peating often to himself the lines from the Vanity of 
 Human Wishes : 
 
 1 Shall helpless man, in ignorance sedate, 
 Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate ? ' 
 
 The Lord Advocate had brought into the Commons 
 a bill for the reconstruction of the Court of Session, 
 proposing to reduce the number of judges from fifteen 
 to ten, with a corresponding increase of salary. The 
 occasion was wildly seized by Boswell in May 1785 
 to issue a half-crown pamphlet, with the title, ' A letter 
 to the People of Scotland, on the alarming attempt to 
 infringe the Articles of the Union, and introduce a most 
 pernicious innovation, by diminishing the number of 
 the Lords of Session.' This extraordinary production, 
 intended doubtless as a means of recommendation of 
 the author for parliamentary honours, can hardly now 
 be read in the light of events by any sympathetic 
 Boswellian but with feelings of sorrow and confusion. 
 Its publication we may be sure would never have been 
 sanctioned by Johnson. 
 
 After stating the foundation of the Court of Session, 
 by James V. in 1532, on the model of the Parliament 
 of Paris, he attacks Dundas for having in himself the 
 whole power of a grand jury. ' Mr Edward Bright of 
 
i2 4 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 Maiden, the fat man whose print is in all our inns, 
 could button seven men in his waistcoat; but the 
 learned lord comprehends hundreds/ He calls on the 
 Scottish people not to be cowed : ' let Lowther come 
 forth (we cannot emulate Boswell in the plenitude and 
 the magnitude of his capital letters and ' other typo- 
 graphical devices), he upon whom the thousands of 
 Whitehaven depend for three of the elements.' His 
 own opposition he proclaims is honest, because he has 
 no wish for an office in the Court of Session ; he will try 
 his abilities in a wider sphere. Rumours of a coalition 
 in the county of Ayr between Sir Adam Ferguson and 
 the Earl of Eglintoun he hopes are unfounded, 'both 
 as an enthusiast for ancient feudal attachments, and as 
 having the honour and happiness to be married to his 
 lordship's relation, a true Montgomerie, whom I esteem, 
 whom I love, after fifteen years, as on the day when she 
 gave me her hand.' He assures the people they will 
 have their objections to the bill supported by 'my old 
 classical companion Wilkes, with whom I pray you to 
 excuse my keeping company, he is so pleasant ; ' by Mr 
 Burke, the Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, 
 and by 'that brave Irishman, Captain Macbride, the 
 cousin of my wife.' In grandiose capitals he appeals 
 to Fox and to Pitt. ' Great sir,' he cries, ' forgive 
 my thus presumptuously, thus rashly, attempting for a 
 moment to forge your thunder ! But I conjure you in 
 the name of God and the King, I conjure you to 
 announce in your own lofty language, that there shall be 
 a stop put to this conspiracy, which I fear might have 
 the effect of springing a mine that would blow up your 
 administration.' This letter 'hastily written upon the 
 spur of the occasion is already too long,' yet he calls 
 upon his countrymen to allow him to 'indulge a little 
 more my own egotism and vanity, the indigenous plants 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 125 
 
 of my own mind/ His whole genealogy, Flodden and 
 all, we hear over again. ' If,' he pertinently adds, ' it 
 should be asked what this note has to do here, I answer 
 to illustrate the authour of the text. And to pour out all 
 myself as old Montaigne, I wish all this to be known/ 
 After a eulogy of himself as no time-server, and his pro- 
 fession of readiness ' to discuss topicks with mitred St 
 Asaph, and others ; to drink, to laugh, to converse with 
 Quakers, Republicans, Jews and Moravians/ he exhorts 
 his friends and countrymen, in the words of his departed 
 Goldsmith, who gave him many Attic nights and that 
 jewel of the finest water, the acquaintance of Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds, 'to fly from petty tyrants to the throne.' 
 He declares himself a Tory, but no slave. He is in 
 possession of an essay, dictated to him by Dr Johnson, 
 on the distinction between Whig and Tory, and con- 
 cludes with eclat, 'with one of the finest passages in 
 John Home's noble and elegant tragedy of Douglas? 
 
 No condensation of this, the most * characteristical ' 
 of all his writings, can give the reader any idea of this 
 extraordinary production. Once only does it deviate 
 into sense when, on the last page, we find the advertise- 
 ment of the Tour to the Hebrides, ' which was read and 
 liked by Dr Johnson, and will faithfully and minutely 
 exhibit what he said was the pleasantest part of his 
 life.' 
 
 In the Hilary Term of 1786, he was called to the 
 English bar, feeling it, as he said, ' a pity to dig in a 
 lead mine, when he could dig in a gold one.' Johnson 
 had always thrown cold water on the idea, though as 
 early as February 1775, as we find from a letter of 
 BoswelPs to Strahan the printer, the idea had been 
 proposed to him. In the May of 1786 he writes to 
 Mickle, the translator of the Lusiad, that he is in a 
 wavering state ; he has the house of his friend Hoole, 
 
126 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 and he still retains the use of General Paoli's residence 
 in Portman Square. When he did finally take up his 
 own quarters in Cavendish Square, the result was not 
 what he had expected. He was discouraged by the 
 want of practice, and the prospect of any. In fact, he 
 was to feel what, as Malone says, Lord Auchinleck had 
 all along told his son, that it would cost him much 
 more trouble to hide his ignorance of Scotch and 
 English law than to shew his knowledge. He feared 
 his own deficiencies in ' the forms, quirks and 
 quiddities/ which he saw could be learned only by 
 early habit. He even doubted whether he should not 
 be satisfied with being simply baron of Auchinleck with 
 a good income in Scotland; but he felt that such a 
 course could not c deaden the ambition which has 
 raged in my veins like a fever.' The Horatian 
 motto inscribed on the front of Auchinleck House, 
 telling of the peace of mind dearer than all to be found 
 everywhere, if the mind itself is in its own place, was 
 never appreciated, however, by the new laird. 
 
 His ignorance of law was soon shewn at the Lancaster 
 assizes. Mr Leslie Stephen is inclined to view the story 
 as being not very credible. Yet we fear the authority 
 is indisputable. 'We found Jemmy Boswell,' writes 
 Lord Eldon, ' lying upon the pavement inebriated. 
 We subscribed at supper a guinea for him and half a 
 guinea for his clerk, and sent him next morning a 
 brief with instructions to move for the writ of Quare 
 adhczsit pavimento, with observations calculated to 
 induce him to think that it required great learning to 
 explain the necessity of granting it. He sent all round 
 the town to attorneys for books, but in vain. He 
 moved, however, for the writ, making the best use he 
 could of the observations in the brief. The judge was 
 astonished, and the audience amazed. The judge said, 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 127 
 
 c I never heard of such a writ what can it be that 
 adheres pavimento ? Are any of you gentlemen at the 
 bar able to explain this ? ' The Bar laughed. At last 
 one of them said, * My Lord, Mr Boswell last night 
 adhasit pavimento. There was no moving him for 
 some time. At last he was carried to bed, and he has 
 been dreaming about himself and the pavement.' 
 Lord Jeffrey once assisted Bozzy to bed in similar 
 circumstances. 'You are a promising lad/ he told 
 him next morning, 'and if you go on as you have 
 begun, you may be a Bozzy yourself yet.' No wonder 
 that we find him hesitating about going on the spring 
 northern circuit, which would cost him, he says, fifty 
 pounds, and oblige him to be in rough company for 
 four weeks. 
 
 His only piece of promotion came from Lord 
 Lonsdale. Pitt had been brought in by this nobleman 
 for the pocket-borough of Appleby, and Bozzy had hopes 
 of a Parliamentary introduction that way. Carlyle of 
 Inveresk found this worthless patron of the unfortunate 
 office seeker ' more detested than any man alive, as a 
 shameless political sharper, a domestic bashaw, and an 
 intolerable tyrant over his tenants.' Penrith and 
 Whitehaven were in fear when he walked their streets ; 
 he defied his creditors ; and the father of the poet 
 Wordsworth died without being able to enforce his 
 claims. The author of the Rolliad describes his power 
 as 
 
 ' Even by the elements confessed, 
 Of mines and boroughs Lonsdale stands possessed ; 
 And one sad servitude alike denotes 
 The slave that labours and the slave that votes.' 
 
 It was on this political boroughmonger and jobber 
 that Boswell was now pinning his faith. The complete 
 
128 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 dependence of him on Lonsdale in return for the 
 Recordership of Carlisle did not escape the notice of the 
 wits, who now found that the writer who had been 
 declaring over the India Bill of Fox his devotion to 
 the throne, the Tory, but no slave, had transferred his 
 entire loyalty and abjectest protestations to ' his king in 
 Westmoreland/ To add to his distress, his wife was 
 dying. A short trial of London had led her to return 
 to Ayrshire, and her husband was lost in doubt whether 
 to revisit her or cling to ' the great sphere of England/ 
 the whirl of the metropolis, in hopes that the great prize 
 would at last be drawn. In the north he found her 
 still lingering on, but in his eagerness to obtain political 
 influence ' I drank so freely that riding home in the 
 dark I fell from my horse and bruised my shoulder.' 
 From London he was again summoned, but with his 
 curious infelicity at such times of trouble, he was not in 
 time to witness her death : * not till my second daughter 
 came running out from the house and announced to us 
 the dismal event in a burst of tears. 7 Remorse found 
 vent in an agony of grief. ' She never would have left 
 me/ he cries to Temple ; ' this reflection will pursue 
 me to my grave/ In July, the widower of a month 
 hastened north to contest the county, only to find Sir 
 Adam Fergusson chosen. ' Let me never impiously re- 
 pine/ is his cry of distress. * Yet as " Jesus wept " for 
 the death of Lazarus, I hope my tears at this time are 
 excused. The woeful circumstance of such a state of 
 mind is that it rejects consolation ; it feels an indulgence 
 in its own wretchedness. 7 His hustings appearances 
 would appear to have been at least marked by fluency, 
 for Burns, his junior by eighteen years, declares his own 
 inability to fight like Montgomerie or ' gab like 
 Boswell.' 
 
 As he draws to a close, the letters of Boswell improve 
 
JAMES BOS WELL 129 
 
 both in form and matter. It is painful to see him on 
 every hand seeking the Parliamentary interest out of 
 which he was all the while doing his best to write 
 himself. No party could or would take him seriously. 
 His rent-roll was over ,1600, a large sum in these 
 days, and it was yearly rising. Earnestly did his 
 brother David press upon him a return to Auchinleck 
 and the retrenchment of his expenses. But the spell 
 of the lights of London was on him, and * I could not 
 endure Edinburgh/ he tells us, ( unless I were to have 
 a judge's place to bear me up/ and that was a thing 
 not to be dreamed of after the publication of the Letter. 
 He dispersed his family to various schools, finding the 
 eldest of the boys beginning to oppose him, 'and no 
 wonder/ as he bitterly adds. Then the cry is forced 
 from him in allusion to the famous passage in Shake- 
 speare on Wolsey's hopes and fall a passage which, 
 curiously enough, we have come upon in the common- 
 place book which Boswell had kept as a boy 'O 
 Temple, Temple, is this realizing any of the towering 
 hopes which have so often been the subject of our letters. 
 Yet I live much with a great man, who, upon any day 
 that his fancy shall be inclined, may obtain for me an 
 office.' Everywhere he casts about, trying the Lord 
 Chancellor, not seeing the smallest opening in West- 
 minster Hall, but buoyed up by 'the delusion that 
 practice may come at any time.' 
 
 ' We must do something for you/ Burke had said in 
 a kindly way, 'for our own sakes.' He recommended 
 him to General Con way, but though the place was not 
 obtained the letter was valued by Boswell more. 
 Writing to Mr Abercrombie in America, even as late 
 as the July of 1793, he is found expressing 'a great 
 wish to see that country; and I once flattered myself 
 that I should be sent thither in a station of some 
 
130 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 importance ; ' and from a letter to Burke we learn that 
 this expected post had been a commissionership in the 
 treaty between America and Britain. Dundas was 
 another of his hopes. c The excellent Langton says 
 it is disgraceful, it is utter folly in Pitt not to attach 
 to his administration a man of my popular and pleasant 
 talents.' Dundas, however, after having been given a 
 margin of two months for a reply, has made no sign ; 
 'how can I delude myself? I will tell you/ he informs 
 Temple, 'Lord Lonsdale shews me more and more 
 regard. Three of his members assure me that he will 
 give me a seat at the General Election.' Then that 
 last reed was to break. At Lowther Castle, his wig 
 was removed from his room, as a practical joke of a 
 coarse order on the unoffending Boswell, and all the 
 day he was obliged to go in his nightcap, which he felt 
 was very ill-timed to one in his situation. The loss of 
 the wig the unsuspecting victim declares will remain as 
 great a secret as the writer of the letters of Junius, but 
 ere long the tyrant whom he had invoked as the man 
 of Macedonia to help Scotland has undeceived him. 
 'I suppose you thought/ he roughly said, 'I was to 
 bring you into Parliament ? I never had any such in- 
 tention/ It is impossible not to feel for Boswell at this 
 crisis. ' I am down at an inn/ he writes to Temple, 
 4 and ashamed and sunk on account of the disappoint- 
 ment of hopes which led me to endure such grievances. 
 I deserve all that I suffer. I am at the same time dis- 
 tracted what to do in my own county. I am quite in 
 a fever. O my old and most intimate friend, I intreat 
 you to afford me some consolation, and pray do not 
 divulge my mortification. I now resign my Recorder- 
 ship, and shall get rid of all connection with this brutal 
 fellow.' His last Parliamentary venture was cut short 
 by the reflection how small was his following. How 
 
JAMES BOS WELL 131 
 
 curiously after all this reads his own little autobio- 
 graphical sketch in the European Magazine I ' It was 
 generally supposed that Mr Boswell would have had a 
 seat in Parliament ; and indeed his not being amongst 
 the Representatives of the Commons is one of those 
 strange things which occasionally happen in the complex 
 operations of our mixed Government. That he has not 
 been brought into Parliament by some great man is not 
 to be wondered at when we peruse his publick declara- 
 tion.' Not to be wondered at, truly, though the writer 
 chose to refer the wonder to his independence. Then 
 the reader is informed how he had been a candidate at 
 the general election for his own county of Ayr, ' where 
 he has a very extensive property and a very fine place 
 of which there is a view and description in Grose's 
 Antiquities of Scotland J The conclusion of the sketch 
 relates how, at the last Lord Mayor's day, he sang with 
 great applause a state-ballad of his own composition, 
 entitled The Grocer of London. This was the last shot 
 in the political locker. At a Guildhall dinner, given to 
 Pitt by the worshipful company of grocers, Boswell 
 contrived to get himself called upon for a song. He 
 rose, and delivered himself of a catch on the model of 
 Dibdin's ' Little cherub that sits up aloft/ prefaced 
 and interlarded by an address to the guest of the 
 evening. Honoured as he had been on his continental 
 tour at the courts of Europe, yet never till to-night had 
 he felt himself so flattered as now he was, in the 
 presence of the minister he admired, and to whose 
 home and foreign policy he gave a hearty, if discrimi- 
 nating support. Boswell for his song was encored six 
 times, till the cold features of the minister were seen to 
 relax in a smile, amid the general roar of plaudits and 
 laughter ! After this ' state ballad, ' a copy of which 
 was last seen at Lord Houghton's sale, Eozzy and a 
 
132 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 friend, in a state of high glee, returned to their lodgings, 
 shouting all the way The Grocer of London I ' He has 
 declared/ adds the complacent autobiographer, 'his 
 resolution to persevere on the next vacancy.* 
 
 All this time his great work was slowly advancing. 
 At the end of the Journal had appeared a notice : 
 'preparing for the Press, in one volume quarto, the 
 Life of Samuel Johnson, ZZ.Z>., by James Boswell, Esq.' 
 The note proceeds to sketch the plan ; the collecting of 
 materials for more than twenty years, his desire to erect 
 to him a literary monument, the interweaving of 'the 
 most authentick accounts ' that can be obtained from 
 those who knew him, etc. To his chagrin, Mrs Thrale's 
 volume of anecdotes had been out before him, and Sir 
 John Hawkins had been commissioned by the London 
 booksellers to produce a Life, which had duly appeared. 
 Not even the unequivocal success and merits of the 
 Journal could induce ' the trade ' to take Boswell seri- 
 ously. No one had thought of him, any more than Gay 
 would have been thought of as the biographer of the 
 circle to which he had been admitted. Percy, even Sir 
 William Scott, had been successively approached, but 
 none had given a consideration to 'Johnson's Bozzy.' 
 Such neglect, however, must have spurred him to exer- 
 tion. The lively lady's anecdotage, dateless and confused, 
 he could afford to despise as ' too void of method even 
 for such a farrago/ as Horace Walpole said of it. But 
 the solemn Hawkins, as an old friend and executor of 
 Johnson's will, was a more dangerous rival. ' Observe 
 how he talks of me/ cries Boswell querulously, 'as 
 quite unknown. 1 No doubt Sir John was ' unclubable/ 
 and by Reynolds, Dyer, Percy, and Malone he was 
 detested. Yet his book, though eclipsed by Boswell's, 
 is not unmeritorious ; but for his allusion to ' Mr 
 Boswell, a native of Scotland/ he has been made to 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 133 
 
 pay severely by systematic castigation from his rival, 
 who now doggedly, as Johnson would have said, set 
 himself to the work before him. Wherever first-hand 
 information could be had, he was constantly on the 
 track. Miss Burney has told how she met him at the 
 gate of the choir of St George's chapel at Windsor 
 4 his comic-serious face having lost none of its wonted 
 singularity, nor yet his mind and language.' She had 
 letters from Johnson, and he must have some of the 
 doctor's choice little notes : ' We have seen him long 
 enough upon stilts, I want to shew him in a new light. 
 He proposed a thousand curious expedients to get 
 them, but I was invincible.' The approach of the 
 king and queen broke off the interview, but next 
 morning he was again on the watch. We must regret 
 that they were not given, however much his indiscretions 
 had made people chary of their confidences. ' Jemmy 
 Bos well,' writes Lord Eldon, c called upon me, desiring 
 to know my definition of taste. I told him I must 
 decline defining it, because I knew he would publish it.' 
 To secure first-hand, sifted, and ' authentick ' material 
 this man, so long decried by sciolists as merely a fool 
 with a note-book, would forego every rebuff or refusal. 
 1 Boswell,' says Horace Walpole, ' that quintessence of 
 busy-bodies called on me last week, and was let in when 
 he should not have been. After tapping many topics, 
 to which I made as dry answers as an unbribed oracle, 
 he vented his errand ; * had I seen Dr Johnson's Lives 
 of the Poets ?' 
 
 During the progress of the Life he turned aside to 
 his last literary vagary No Abolition of Slavery ; or the 
 Universal Empire of Love, 1791. This long-lost 
 brochure has this year been rediscovered, but it will add 
 little interest to his life, as its main tenets had long 
 been known. A writer in the Athenaum for May 9th 
 
134 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 describes it as quarto in form, and dedicated to Miss 
 
 B , whom he identifies with Miss Bagnal to be 
 
 shortly mentioned. On the three topics of slavery, the 
 Middlesex election, and America, Bozzy differed respect- 
 fully but firmly from the doctor, who drank at Oxford 
 to the next insurrection of the negroes' in the West 
 Indies. Accordingly he stands stoutly by the planters 
 and the feudal scheme of subordination, whose annihila- 
 tion he maintains would ' shut the gates of mercy on 
 mankind.' For his apparent inconsistency Burke is 
 attacked : 
 
 ' Burke, art thou here, too ? thou whose pen 
 Can blast the fancied rights of men. 
 Pray by what logic are those rights 
 Allow'd to Blacks, denied to Whites ? ' 
 
 Others may fail their king and country, but he as a 
 throne and altar Tory calls all to know that 
 
 * An ancient baron of the land 
 I by my king shall ever stand.' 
 
 He was now at last near the haven. The mass of 
 his papers and materials had been arranged, after a 
 labour which, as he tells Reynolds, was really enormous. 
 The capacity for sustained effort, when set to it, of 
 which he had boasted over his condensation of the 
 evidence in the great Douglas case, stood him now in 
 good service amid all his vexations, dissipations and 
 follies. 
 
 In February 1788 we hear of his having yet seven 
 years of the life to write. By January 1789 he had 
 finished the introduction and the dedication to Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds, both of which had appeared difficult, 
 but he was confident they had been well done. To 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 135 
 
 excite the interest in his coming book, or as Mr Leslie 
 Stephen thinks, to secure copyright, he published in 
 1790 two quarto parts at half a guinea each the 
 letter to Chesterfield and the conversation of Johnson 
 with the king. By December he has had additional 
 matter sent him from Warren Hastings, and he hoped 
 to be out on 8th March, but the January of the new 
 year found him with still two hundred pages of copy, 
 and the death not yet written. Yet many a time, as 
 he writes Temple, had he thought of giving it up. To 
 add to his troubles, he had indulged in landed specula- 
 tions, paying 2 500 for the estate of a younger branch; 
 he had been lending money to a cousin, and if he could 
 but raise a thousand pounds on the strength of his 
 book, he should be inclined to hold on, or * game with 
 it/ as Sir Joshua said. Neither Reynolds nor Malone, 
 however, took the hint ; and at the latter's door he cast 
 longing looks as he passed. He tells him he had been 
 in the chair at the club, with Fox ' quoting Homer and 
 Fielding to the astonishment of Jo. Warton.' He had 
 bought a lottery ticket with the hopes of the prize of 
 ^5000, but blank ! The advance he needed was got 
 elsewhere, and the property in his book saved. April 
 finds him correcting the last sheet. He feared the 
 result : ' I may get no profit, the public may be 
 disappointed, I may make enemies, even have quarrels. 
 But the very reverse of all this may happen/ Then 
 on the 1 9th he writes to Dempster : 'my magnum opus, 
 in two volumes quarto, is to be published on Monday, 
 1 6th May ' by a lucky chance it was the anniversary 
 of the red day in Boswell's calendar, his meeting with 
 Johnson eight and twenty years before ! ' When it is 
 fairly launched, I mean to stick close to Westminster 
 Hall, and it will be truly kind if you recommend me 
 appeals or causes of any sort/ 
 
i 3 6 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 The rest of his life is soon told. Paoli was now 
 again in Corsica. When Mirabeau had recalled the 
 exiles, the general had been made by Louis XVI. 
 military commandant of the island. Johnson, also, 
 was gone, and the two strongest checks upon the 
 excesses of Boswell were removed. Piteous it is to 
 find him writing to Malone : ' that most friendly fellow 
 Courtenay, begging the pardon of an M.P. for so free 
 an epithet,' had taken him in hand, and had taken his 
 word that for some months his daily allowance of wine 
 should not exceed four good glasses at dinner, and a 
 pint after it. The qualifying adjective * good ' is 
 dangerous, and before the time for the bill was half 
 expired, Bozzy has closured it and the amendment. 
 The state of his affairs, the loss of his wife bore heavily 
 on him, together with 'the disadvantage to my 
 children in having so wretched a father nay, the want 
 of absolute certainty of being happy after death, the 
 sure prospect of which is frightful.' Then a fitful 
 gleam of the old Adam breaks out. He has heard of 
 a Miss Bagnal, 'about seven and twenty, lively and gay, 
 a Ranelagh girl, but of excellent principles insomuch 
 that she reads prayers to the servants in her father's 
 family every Sunday evening.' Another matrimonial 
 scheme was the daughter of the late Dean of Exeter, 
 'a most agreeable woman d'un certain dge,' as he 
 engagingly adds, 'and with a fortune of ; 10,000.' 
 The preparation of a second edition of the Life for July 
 1793 raised his spirits, but after a while he had run 
 into excess, been knocked down and robbed. This 
 he vows shall be a crisis in his life, and Temple's 
 apprehension of his friend being carried off in a state 
 of intoxication he finds awful to contemplate. Early in 
 1795 the end is announced by Temple's son writing 
 to his father c a few nights ago Mr Boswell returned 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 137 
 
 from the Literary Club, quite weak and languid ; ' and 
 the last letter to Temple from his correspondent of 
 thirty-seven years is dated 8th April : ' I would fain 
 write to you in my own hand, but really cannot.' His 
 son James finishes the letter, to tell that the patient 
 ' feels himself a good deal stronger to-day/ He was 
 attended by Dr Warren, who had been with Johnson 
 as he died. Some slight hopes of a recovery had been 
 held out ; and, with the ruling passion strong in death 
 to interview a celebrity, he rallied in a letter to Warren 
 Hastings. With the spirit on him of the days when 
 he had told Chatham that his disinterested soul had 
 enjoyed the contemplation of the great minister in the 
 bower of philosophy, he tells him, * the moment I am 
 able to go abroad, I will fly to Mr Hastings and expand 
 my soul in the purest satisfaction.' On May i Qth 
 1795, at two m tne rnorning, after an illness of five 
 weeks, he died. He was in his fifty-fifth year. 
 
 A life which cannot challenge the world's attention 
 like that of John Sterling which perhaps does not even 
 modestly solicit it, yet one which no less certainly will 
 be found to reward the critic of literary history and 
 pathology. A complex, weak, unsteady life enough, 
 and no one did more than Boswell himself to bring 
 into glaring prominence the faults that lie on the surface, 
 by that frank, open, and ostentatious peculiarity which 
 he avowed, and which he compared to the characteristics 
 of the old seigneur, Michael de Montaigne. Never 
 was there a franker critic of James Boswell, Esq., 
 than himself; 'the most unscottified of mortals,' as 
 Johnson called him, has little or none of the reserve 
 and reticence that are generally supposed to be marks 
 of the national character. A rare and curious Epistle 
 in Verse, by the Rev. Samuel Martin of Monimail, 
 1795, touches on the main points of his life, and the 
 
138 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 author, who was apparently a friend of Boswell, had 
 learned ' with affectionate concern and respect that at 
 the end prayer was his stay/ He criticises, in rather 
 halting and prosaic lines, 
 
 1 The prison scenes, his prying into death,. 
 How felons and how saints resign their breath ; 
 How varying and conflicting passions roll, 
 How scaffold exhibitions shew the soul. ' 
 
 He laments his 'injurious hilarity/ his degrading 
 himself as ' the little bark, attendant on the huge all- 
 bearing ark,' his political and ecclesiastical aberrations 
 from the surer and better standpoints of his family and 
 country. The feeling of this friend of Boswell would 
 represent, we cannot doubt, the verdict at the time of 
 his own circle. 
 
 The ' prison scenes ' are an integral part in BoswelPs 
 psychology. Never did George Selwyn attend them 
 with greater regularity, or Wyndham run after prize 
 rights more assiduously. In the Public Advertizer, 
 April 25, 1768, we find him writing: 'I myself am 
 never absent from a publick execution. When I first 
 attended them, I was shocked to the greatest degree 
 . . . convulsed with pity and terror. I feel an 
 irresistible impulse to be present at every execution, as 
 there I behold the various effects of the near approach 
 of death. 1 The parallels of Charles V., Philip II., 
 Philip IV., Charles II. of Spain, will not escape the 
 reader, and strangely, or rather naturally enough, 
 Boswell is found disagreeing with the censure pronounced 
 by Johnson on the celebration of his own obsequies in 
 his lifetime by Charles V. In the St Jame? Gazette of 
 April 20, 1779, he is found actually riding in the cart 
 to Tyburn with Hackman, the murderer of Miss Ray, 
 and writing to the papers over the feeling of ' unusual 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 139 
 
 Depression of Spirits, joined with that Pause, which so 
 solemn a warning of the dreadful effects that the 
 Passion of Love may produce must give all of us who 
 have lively Sensations and warm Tempers/ But he 
 suddenly deviates into business when he adds that * it 
 is very philosophically explained and illustrated in the 
 Hypochondriack, a periodical Paper, peculiarly adapted 
 to the people of England, and which comes out monthly 
 in the London Magazine, etc.' In his Corsican tour 
 we had seen him interviewing the executioner in the 
 island, and some days before his final parting with 
 Johnson he had witnessed the execution of fifteen men 
 before Newgate and been clouded in his mind by 
 doubts as to whether human life was or was not mere 
 machinery and a chain of planned fatality. These 
 cravings are clearly the marks of a mind morbidly 
 affected and diseased, the result of the Dutch marriage 
 as Ramsay believed. All through his life Boswell is 
 conscious of his * distempered imagination,' and the 
 letters to Temple are scattered with irrelevances and 
 repetitions, fatuities and inconsistencies that can be 
 explained only on the score of mental disease. Were 
 any doubts possible on this point, the expressions of 
 his opinions on religion would dispel them. His 
 * Popish imagination, 7 quickened as it may have been 
 by the escapade with the actress, was but the natural 
 outcome of an ill-balanced mind. His feelings about 
 consecrated places, loca solennia such as lona, and 
 Wittenberg, Rasay and Carlisle, we have seen. He 
 delighted, says Malone, in what he called the mysterious^ 
 leading Johnson on ghosts, and kindred subjects. He 
 was a believer in second sight : * it pleases my super- 
 stition, 1 he tells Temple, * which you know is not 
 small, and being not of the gloomy but the grand 
 species is an enjoyment/ When his uncle John died, 
 
140 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 we learn he was 'a good scholar and affectionate 
 relative, but had no conduct. And, do you know, he 
 was not confined to one woman ; he had a strange kind 
 of religion, but I flatter myself he will be ere long, if 
 he is not already, in heaven ! ' He comforts himself 
 constantly over life being a mere state of purification, 
 and looks forward to a condition of events in which ' a 
 man can soap his own beard and enjoy whatever is to 
 be had in this transitory state of things/ He is for ever 
 questioning Johnson upon purgatory, 'having much 
 curiosity to know his notions on that point/ One of 
 the last authentic glimpses of Boswell is his being found 
 in the company of Wilberforce, going west, with a night- 
 cap in his pocket, on some visit to a friend such as 
 Miss Hawkins says he was but too fond of doing, 
 ' away to the west as the sun went down ' doubtful 
 of future punishment, but resolute in maintaining the 
 depravity of man. It would almost appear as if Bozzy 
 had read himself into Butler's doctrine that our present 
 life is a state of probation for a future one, but had 
 forgotten the qualification 'that our future interest is 
 now depending on ourselves/ 
 
 The very influence of Johnson himself may have 
 affected the weaker mind of Boswell injuriously. Both 
 suffered from hypochondria, though that of the latter 
 was far distant from the affliction of Johnson whom Dr 
 Adams found 'in a deplorable state, sighing, groaning, 
 talking to himself, and restlessly walking from room 
 to room.' Temple maintained that the effect of 
 Johnson's company had been of a depressing nature 
 to his friend, and Sir Wm. Forbes believed that some 
 slight tincture of superstition had been contracted from 
 his companionship with the sage. The ' cloudy dark- 
 ness,' as he himself calls it, of his mind, the weakness 
 and the confusion of moral principles manifest enough 
 
UNIVERSITY 
 
 JAMES BOSWELL 141 
 
 in the Temple correspondence, are better revealed in 
 the conversation with Johnson at Squire Dilly's, 'where 
 there is always abundance of excellent fare and hearty 
 welcome.' 'Being in a frame of mind which, I hope 
 for the felicity of human nature, many experience, 
 in fine weather, at the country-house of a friend, 
 consoled and elevated by pious exercises, I expressed 
 myself with an unrestrained fervour to my "guide, 
 philosopher, and friend;" My dear Sir, I would fain 
 be a good man ; and I am very good now. I fear 
 God, and honour the King ; I wish to do no ill, and 
 to be benevolent to all mankind.' He looked at me 
 with a benignant indulgence; but took occasion to 
 give me wise and salutary caution. ' Do not, sir, 
 accustom yourself to trust to impressions? Boswell 
 had surely forgotten all this when he cries bitterly to 
 Temple that he was inclined to agree with him in 
 thinking 'my great oracle did allow too much credit 
 to good principles, without good practice.' Perhaps 
 he remembered Johnson's appreciation of Campbell, 
 the good pious man that never passed a church without 
 pulling off his hat, all which shewed 'he has good 
 principles.' Boswell had, unfortunately, been 'caught 
 young ' by the sceptical talk of Dempster, Hume, and 
 Wilkes, and his extended Continental ramble had im- 
 paired the earlier views under which he had been reared. 
 But James Boswell deserves at the hands of his 
 readers and of critics better treatment than has been 
 measured out to him in the contemptuous estimate 
 of Macaulay, and, still worse, in the shrill attack of 
 the smaller brood 'whose sails were never to the 
 tempest given,' but who have, by the easy repetition 
 of a few phrases and an imperfect acquaintance with 
 the writings and character of the man they decry, 
 come to the complacent depreciation which, as Niebuhr 
 
142 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 said, is ever so dear to the soul of mediocrity. If 
 James Boswell was not like Goldsmith, a great man, 
 as Johnson finely pronounced, whose frailties should 
 not be remembered, nor was, perhaps, in any final 
 sense a great writer, yet for twenty years he had been 
 the tried friend of the man who at the Mitre had 
 called out to him, ' Give me your hand, I have taken 
 a liking to you/ A plant that, like Goldsmith also, 
 1 flowered late/ he has created in literature and 
 biography a revolution, and produced a work whose 
 surpassing merits and value are known the more that 
 it is studied. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 IN LITERATURE 
 ' Eclipse is first, the rest nowhere.' MACAULAY. 
 
 ' How delicate, decent is English Biography/ says 
 Carlyle, * bless its mealy mouth ! A Damocles sword 
 of Respectability hangs for ever over the poor English 
 Life-writer (as it does over poor English Life in general), 
 and reduces him to the verge of paralysis. Thus it 
 has been said there are no English lives worth reading, 
 except those of Players, who by the nature of the case 
 have bidden Respectability good-day. The English 
 biographer has long felt that, if in writing his man's 
 biography he wrote down anything that could by 
 possibility offend any man, he had written wrong/ 
 The biographer, as Mr Froude found out for a com- 
 mentary on all this, is placed between a Scylla and 
 Charybdis, between what is due to the subject, and 
 what is expected by the public. If something is left 
 out of the portrait, the likeness will be imperfect; if 
 the anxiety or the inquisitiveness of readers to know 
 private details is left ungratified, the writer will be met 
 by the current cant that the public has a right to know. 
 The line is not easily drawn, and few subjects for the 
 biographer can ever desire to be as candidly dealt with 
 by him as Cromwell acted with Sir Peter Lely, in the 
 request to be painted as he was, warts and all. Thus, 
 
 143 
 
144 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 too often the result will be but biography written in 
 vacuO) ' the tragedy of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet 
 omitted by particular desire.' 
 
 Biography, like History, has suffered from considera- 
 tions of dignity and propriety. The writers of the 
 Hume and Robertson school of history, in their 
 stately minuet with the historical muse, have been 
 careful to exclude everything that seemed beneath the 
 dignity of the sceptred pall ; biographers have as con- 
 sciously studied the proprieties. ' The Muse of 
 history/ says Thackeray, c wears the mask and speaks 
 to measure ; she too in our age busies herself with the 
 affairs only of kings. I wonder shall history ever pull 
 off her periwig and cease to be Court-ridden? I 
 would have History familiar rather than heroic, and 
 think that Mr Hogarth and Mr Fielding will give our 
 children a much better idea of the manners of the 
 present age in England, than the Court Gazette and 
 the newspapers which we get thence. 1 As the 
 historian has striven to obscure the real nature of 
 the Grand Monarque, by confining his action to 
 courts and battlefields, so the biographer, in his desire 
 of never stepping beyond the proper, has enveloped 
 his hero in a circle of correct ideas, after the manner 
 of George the Fourth and his multiplicity of waist- 
 coats. Dignity and respectability have ruined alike 
 the historian and the biographer. 
 
 Lockhart foresaw that some readers would accuse 
 him of trenching upon delicacy and propriety over his 
 sixth and seventh chapters in the Life of Scott, and 
 the circumstances were after all such as, had choice 
 been permitted him, he might easily have omitted, 
 considering it his duty to tell what he had to say 
 truly and intelligibly. Of all men Macaulay had 
 nothing to fear from any rational biography that should 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 145 
 
 ever be written of him, yet has not Mr Trevelyan 
 assured his readers that the reviewers had told him, 
 that he would much better have consulted his uncle's 
 reputation by the omission of passages in his letters 
 and diaries ? Such criticism, as he justly says, is to 
 seriously misconceive the province and the duty of the 
 biographer, and his justification is that the reading 
 world has long extended to the man the just approba- 
 tion which it so heartily extended to his books. The 
 Latin critics assigned history, and accordingly history 
 in miniature, biography, to the department of oratory. 
 The feeling, in consequence, has long prevailed of re- 
 garding biography as the field for the display of every 
 other feeling then veracity. It has been emotional, 
 or it has been decorously dull. To all such writers 
 the style adopted by Boswell would appear, and justly 
 appear, revolutionary. The cry is raised of there being 
 nothing sacred, of the violation of domestic privacy, 
 of the sanctities of life being endangered, of indiscre- 
 tions, and violations of confidences, by the biographer. 
 Accordingly, just as Macaulay decided that, in general, 
 tragedy was corrupted by eloquence, and comedy by 
 wit, so biography and history have suffered from the 
 dignity of Clio. Boswell was perfectly aware what he 
 was doing, nor did he awake to find himself famous 
 for a method into which the sciolists pretend he only 
 unconsciously blundered. In the preface to the third 
 edition of the Journal he writes : ' Remarks have 
 been industriously circulated in the publick prints by 
 shallow or envious cavillers, who have endeavoured to 
 persuade the world that Dr Johnson's character has 
 been lessened by recording such various instances of 
 his lively wit and acute judgment, on every topick 
 that was presented to his mind. In the opinion of 
 every person of taste and knowledge that I have con- 
 
146 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 versed with, it has been greatly heightened ; and I 
 will venture to predict, that this specimen of his 
 colloquial talents will become still more valuable, 
 when, by the lapse of time, he shall have become an 
 ancient ; and no other memorial of this great and 
 good man shall remain but the following Journal/ 
 This is not the writing of one who has been without 
 a clear idea of what he was undertaking, and of his 
 own qualifications for the task. 'You, my dear sir/ 
 he tells Sir Joshua Reynolds in the dedication, ' per- 
 ceived all the shades which mingled in the grand com- 
 position ; all the peculiarities and slight blemishes 
 which marked the literary Colossus/ The inclusion 
 of the letters and of private details was an integral 
 part of his scheme. When he introduced the subject 
 of biography at Dr Taylor's, no doubt with his own 
 book in his eye, he said that in writing a man's life 
 the man's peculiarities should be mentioned because 
 they mark his character. When he resolved on their 
 publication, he thought it right to ask Johnson ex- 
 plicitly on this point, and the reply was what in 1773 
 the doctor had given to Macleod in Skye, when he 
 had asked if Orrery had done wrong, to expose the 
 defects of Swift with whom he had lived in terms of 
 intimacy. ' Why, no, sir,' Johnson had decided, ' after 
 the man is dead, for then it is done historically.' 
 A biographer that would omit or disguise the relations 
 of Nelson to Lady Hamilton, would be justly suspected 
 of disingenuousness, and Lockhart, especially in his 
 treatment of the political side of his subject, for 
 example in the notorious Beacon incident is but too 
 open to this charge. But disingenuousness is a charge 
 that never could have occurred to Boswell, whose 
 veracity is the prime quality that has made him im- 
 mortal. When the Journal was in the press, Hannah 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 147 
 
 More, studious of the name of the moralist and the 
 sage, ' besought him to mitigate his asperities.' c I will 
 not,' said Boswell roughly, but wisely for posterity, c cut 
 off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat to please anyone.' 
 
 BoswelPs books are veritable books. Few books 
 have had such a severe test applied to them. His 
 first was dedicated to Paoli, whose sanction must be 
 taken to guarantee every line of it. " In every narra- 
 tive," he writes in the dedication to Malone of the 
 Journal, " whether historical or biographical, authenticity 
 is of the utmost consequence. Of this I have ever 
 been so firmly persuaded that I inscribed a former 
 work to that person who was the best judge of its 
 truth. Of this work the manuscript was daily read by 
 Johnson, and you have perused the original and can 
 vouch for the strict fidelity of the present publication." 
 His Life of Johnson was as fearlessly dedicated to Sir 
 Joshua Reynolds, one whose intimacy with Johnson 
 could stamp, with assured knowledge of the subject, 
 the credit and success of the work. Among the ' some 
 dozen, or baker's dozen, and those chiefly of very 
 ancient date,' of reliable biographies whose paucity 
 Carlyle laments, the works of Boswell may be safely 
 included. Their accuracy is confessed by workers in 
 all fields. His Tour created a type ; no better volume 
 of travels has ever been written than the Journal ; and 
 the critic who has dealt at the reputation of Boswell its 
 heaviest blow has yet to confess, that Homer is no more 
 the first of poets, Shakespeare the first of dramatists, 
 Demosthenes the first of orators, than Boswell is the 
 first of biographers, with no second. 
 
 How is this? Written in 1831, before Lockhart 
 Southey and Carlyle by their biographies of Scott, 
 Nelson, and Frederick had appeared as rivals, why is it 
 no less true now? What singular gift or quality can 
 
148 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 account for this singular aloofness from the ordinary or 
 extraordinary class of writers ? Why does Boswell yet 
 wear the crown of indivisible supremacy in biography ? 
 His own words will not explain it, the possession of 
 Johnson's intimacy, the twenty years' view of his subject, 
 his faculty for recollecting, and his assiduity in recording 
 communications. This and more than this Lockhart 
 possessed, the nearest rival to the biographical throne. 
 He was the son-in-law of his subject, for whom he had 
 as true an admiration as Boswell had for Johnson. But 
 Boswell was only in the company of his idol some 180 
 days, or 276 if we include the time on the tour in 
 Scotland, in all the twenty years of his acquaintance. 
 Lockhart had the journals of Sir Walter, and the com- 
 munications of nearly a hundred persons. A comparison 
 in any sense, literary, social, or moral, would have been 
 felt by Lockhart as an insult, for he clearly regards Sir 
 Alexander Boswell as a greater man than his father. 
 But if, like the grandsire of Hubert at Hastings, 
 Lockhart has drawn a good bow, Boswell, like the 
 Locksley of the novelist, has notched his shaft, and 
 comparisons have long ceased to be instituted. Gray 
 has attempted the explanation a fool with a note-book. 
 He has invented nothing, he has only reported. But 
 every year sees that person at work, with his First 
 Impressions of Brittany ', Three Weeks in Greece, and the 
 everlasting Tour in Tartanland. These are the 
 creations of the note-book, but it has given them no 
 permanence. The tourist puts in everything he sees, 
 truly enough, or thinks he sees. But it is the art of 
 Boswell to select c the characteristical,' and the typical, 
 to group and to dramatize. Ninety-four days he spent 
 on the northern tour, and the result is a masterpiece. 
 Pepys is garrulous, often vulgar, always lower-middle- 
 class ; but Boswell writes like a gentleman. 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 149 
 
 Macaulay has explained it by a paradox. Goldsmith 
 was great in spite of his weaknesses, Boswell by reason 
 of his ; if he had not been a great fool, he would never 
 have been a great writer. He was a dunce, a parasite, 
 a coxcomb, a Paul Pry, had a quick observation, a 
 retentive memory, and accordingly he has become 
 immortal ! Alas for the paucity of such immortals 
 under so common circumstances ; their number should 
 be legion ! That a fool may occasionally write 
 interesting matter we know; but that a man should 
 write a literary classic, graced by arrangement, selection, 
 expression, is not even paradox but hyperbole run mad. 
 The truth is, Macaulay had no eye for such a complex 
 character as Boswell. Too correct himself, too prone 
 to the cardinal virtues and consistency, to follow one 
 who, by instinct, seemed to anticipate Wendell Holmes' 
 advice ' Don't be consistent, but be simply true ' 
 and too sound politically in the field where Boswell and 
 the doctor abased themselves in absurd party spirit, 
 Macaulay can no more understand sympathetically the 
 vagaries of Boswell than Mommsen or Drumann can 
 follow the political inconsistency of Cicero. He had no 
 Boswellian ' delight in that intellectual chemistry which 
 can separate good qualities from evil in the same 
 person ; ' and in his essay on Milton he has disclaimed 
 explicitly all such hero-worship of the living or the 
 dead and denounced Boswellism as the most certain 
 mark of an ill-regulated intellect. Nor had he, or 
 Carlyle either, before him the evidence of the letters 
 to Temple. 
 
 Carlyle, in the theory of hero-worship, has made 
 capital use of Boswell. He sees the strong mind of 
 Johnson leading ' the poor flimsy little soul ' of James 
 Boswell ; he feels ' the devout Discipleship, the gyrating 
 observantly round the great constellation.' He has 
 
ISO FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 BoswelFs reiterated declarations to support him. On 
 one side Carlyle's vindication of the biographer is 
 successful; he errs in emphasizing the discovery by 
 Boswell of the Rambler. In such a discovery Langton 
 and Beauclerk had long preceded him, and the Johnson 
 that Boswell met in Davies' parlour was the pensioned 
 writer who had out-lived his dark days, and was the 
 literary dictator of the day, and the associate of Burke 
 and of Reynolds. But Carlyle comes nearer the truth 
 when he touches on the Boswellian recipe for being 
 graphic the possession of an open, loving heart, and 
 what follows from the possession of such. Like White 
 of Selborne, with his sparrows and cockchafers, Bos- 
 well, too, has copied some true sentences from the 
 inspired book of nature. 
 
 But however this may account for his insight the 
 heart seeing farther than the head it will not account 
 for his literary qualities. Of all his contemporaries, 
 Goldsmith and Burke excepted, no one is a greater 
 master of a pure prose style than Boswell, and for ease 
 of narrative, felicity of phrase, and rounded diction he is 
 incomparable. Macaulay believed a London apprentice 
 could detect Scotticisms in Robertson ; Hume's style is 
 often vicious by Gallicisms and Scots law phrases which 
 nothing but his expository gifts have obscured from the 
 critics. Beattie confesses learning English as a dead 
 language and taking several years over the task. But 
 Boswell, * scarce by North Britons now esteemed a 
 Scot,' writes with an ease that renders his style his 
 own. ' The fact is/ says Mr Cotter Morison, * that 
 no dramatist or novelist of the whole century sur- 
 passed or even equalled Boswell in rounded and 
 clear and picturesque presentation, or in real dramatic 
 faculty.' 
 
 Let us take one portrait from the Boswell gallery 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 151 
 
 the meeting of the two old Pembroke men, Johnson and 
 Oliver Edwards. 
 
 'It was in Butcher Row that this meeting happened. Mr 
 Edwards, who was a decent-looking elderly man in gray clothes 
 and a wig of many curls, accosted Johnson with familiar confidence, 
 knowing who he was, while Johnson returned his salutation with a 
 courteous formality, as to a stranger. But as soon as Edwards had 
 brought to his recollection their having been at Pembroke College 
 together nine-and-forty years ago, he seemed much pleased, asked 
 where he lived, and said he should be glad to see him in Bolt 
 Court. EDWARDS : " Ah, sir 1 we are old men now." JOHNSON 
 (who never liked to think of being old) : "Don't let us discourage 
 one another." EDWARDS: "Why, Doctor, you look stout and 
 hearty. I am happy to see you so ; for the newspapers told us you 
 were very ill." JOHNSON: "Ay, sir, they are always telling lies 
 of us old fellows." 
 
 Wishing to be present at more of so singular a conversation as 
 that between two fellow collegians, who had lived forty years in 
 London without ever having chanced to meet, I whispered to Mr 
 Edwards that Dr Johnson was going home, and that he had better 
 accompany him now. So Edwards walked along with us, I eagerly 
 assisting to keep up the conversation. Mr Edwards informed Dr 
 Johnson that he had practised long as a solicitor in Chancery. . . . 
 When we got to Dr Johnson's house and were seated in his library, 
 the dialogue went on admirably. EDWARDS : " Sir, I remember 
 you would not let us say prodigious at College. For even then, 
 sir (turning to me), he was delicate in language, and we all feared 
 him." JOHNSON (to Edwards) : " From your having practised the 
 law long, sir, I presume you must be rich." EDWARDS: "No, 
 sir ; I had a good deal of money ; but I had a number of poor 
 relations to whom I gave great part of it." JOHNSON : "Sir, you 
 have been rich in the most valuable sense of the word. " EDWARDS : 
 11 But I shall not die rich." JOHNSON : " Nay, sure, sir, it is better 
 to live rich, than to die rich." EDWARDS: "I wish I had 
 continued at College." JOHNSON : "Why do you wish that, sir?" 
 EDWARDS : " Because I think I should have had a much easier life 
 than mine has been. I should have been a parson, and had a good 
 living, like Bloxam and several others, and lived comfortably." 
 
152 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 JOHNSON : " Sir, the life of a parson, of a conscientious clergyman, 
 is not easy. I have always considered a clergyman as the father of 
 a larger family than he is able to maintain. I would rather have 
 Chancery suits upon my hands than the cure of souls." Here, 
 taking himself up all of a sudden, he exclaimed, "O! Mr 
 Edwards ! I'll convince you that I recollect you. Do you remember 
 our drinking together at an ale-house near Pembroke Gate ? " . . . 
 EDWARDS: "You are a philosopher, Dr Johnson. I have tried 
 too in my time to be a philosopher ; but, I don't know how, 
 cheerfulness was always breaking in." Mr Burke, Sir Joshua 
 Reynolds, Mr Courtenay, Mr Malone, and, indeed, all the 
 eminent men to whom I have mentioned this, have thought it an 
 exquisite trait of character. The truth is, that philosophy, like 
 religion, is too generally supposed to be hard and severe, at least 
 so grave as to exclude all gaiety. EDWARDS : "I have been twice 
 married, Doctor. You, I suppose, have never known what it was 
 to have a wife." JOHNSON : " Sir, I have known what it was to 
 have a wife, and (in a solemn, tender, faltering tone) I have known 
 what it was to lose a wife. It had almost broke my heart. " 
 
 EDWARDS : " How do you live, sir? For my part, I must have 
 my regular meals, and a glass of good wine. I find I require it." 
 JOHNSON : " I now drink no wine, sir. Early in life I drank wine : 
 for many years I drank none, I then for some years drank a great 
 deal ." EDWARDS : ' ' Some hogsheads, I warrant you. " JOHNSON : 
 * * I then had a severe illness, and left it off. I am a straggler. I 
 may leave this town and go to Grand Cairo, without being missed 
 here or observed there." EDWARDS : " Don't you eat supper, sir ? " 
 JOHNSON : " No, sir." EDWARDS : " For my part, now, I consider 
 supper as a turnpike through which one must pass, in order to get 
 to bed." JOHNSON : "You are a lawyer, Mr Edwards. Lawyers 
 know life practically. A bookish man should always have them to 
 converse with. They have what he wants." EDWARDS : " I am 
 grown old, I am sixty-five." JOHNSON : "I shall be sixty-eight 
 next birthday. Come, sir, drink water, and put in for a hundred." 
 , , . Mr Edwards, when going away, again recurred to his 
 consciousness of senility, and looking full in Johnson's face, said to 
 him, " You'll find in Dr Young, 
 
 1 my coevals ! remnants of yourselves.' 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 153 
 
 Johnson did not relish this at all ; but shook his head with 
 impatience. Edwards walked off seemingly highly pleased with 
 the honour of having been thus noticed by Dr Johnson. When 
 he was gone, I said to Johnson I thought him but a weak man. 
 JOHNSON : " Why, yes, sir. Here is a man who has passed through 
 life without experience : yet I would rather have him with me than 
 a more sensible man who will not talk readily. This man is always 
 willing to say what he has to say." ' 
 
 How admirable is the art in this scene, how numerous 
 and fine are the strokes of character, and the easy turn 
 of the dialogue ! No fool with a note-book, no tippling 
 reporter, as the shallow critics say, could have written 
 this. To them there would have appeared in a chance 
 meeting of two old men nothing worthy of notice, yet 
 how dramatically does Boswell touch off the Philistine 
 side of Edwards, and insert the fine shading and the 
 inimitable remarks about the setting up for the philo- 
 sopher, and supper being a turnpike to bed ! This art 
 of the biographer is what gives a memorableness to 
 slight incidents, by the object being real and really seen; 
 it is the * infinitude of delineation, the intensity of 
 conception which informs the Finite with a certain 
 Infinitude of significance, ennobling the Actual into 
 Idealness. 1 
 
 Openness of mind will do much, but there must be 
 the seeing eye behind it. For the mental development 
 of Boswell, there is no doubt that, as with Goldsmith, 
 his foreign travels had done much. As Addison in the 
 Freeholder had recommended foreign travel to the fox- 
 hunting Tory squires of his day as a purge for their 
 provincial ideas, Boswell shares with the author of the 
 Traveller and the Deserted Village cosmopolitan in- 
 stincts and feelings. * I have always stood up for the 
 Irish/ he writes, ' in whose fine country I have been 
 hospitably and jovially entertained, and with whom I 
 
i54 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 feel myself to be congenial. In my Tour in Corsica I 
 do generous justice to the Irish, in opposition to the 
 English and Scots.' Again, 'I am, I flatter myself, 
 completely a citizen of the world. In my travels through 
 Holland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, 
 I never felt myself from home; and I sincerely love 
 every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.' 
 This is the very antithesis to Johnson, whose frank 
 confession was, ' for anything that I can see, foreigners 
 are fools.' 
 
 Yet Boswell's stock of learning was small. ' I have 
 promised,' he writes in 1775, 'to Dr Johnson to read 
 when I get to Scotland; and to keep an account of 
 what I read. He is to buy for me a chest of books, 
 of his choosing, off stalls, and I am to read more, and 
 drink less that was his counsel.' The death of his 
 wife forces the confession, * how much do I regret that 
 I have not applied myself more to learning,' and he 
 acknowledges to their common friend Langton that, if 
 Johnson had said that Bos well and himself did not 
 talk from books, this was because he had not read 
 books enough to talk from them. In his manuscripts 
 there are many misspellings. He assigns to Terence a 
 Horatian line and, in a letter to Garrick, quotes as 
 Horatian the standard mens sana in corpore sano of 
 Juvenal. More strange is his quoting in a note an 
 illustration of the phrase * Vexing thoughts,' without his 
 being apparently aware that the words are by Rous of 
 Pembroke, the Provost of Eton, whose portrait in the 
 college hall he must often have seen, the writer of the 
 Scottish Metrical Version of the Psalms. Yet his 
 intellectual interests were keen. Late in life he has 
 'done a little at Greek; Lord Monboddo's Ancient 
 Metaphysics which I am reading carefully helps me to 
 recover the language.' He has his little scraps of irritat- 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 155 
 
 ing Latinity which he loves to parade, and when he 
 dined at Eton, at the fellows' table, he c made a con- 
 siderable figure, having certainly the art of making the 
 most of what I know. I had my classical quotations 
 very ready.' Besides, the easy allusiveness of Boswell to 
 books and to matters beyond the scope of general 
 readers, his interest in all things going forward in the 
 Johnsonian circle, his shewing himself in some meta- 
 physical points predestination, for example fully a 
 match for Johnson, and his own words in the Journal 
 ' he had thought more than anybody supposed, and 
 had a pretty good stock of general learning and know- 
 ledge' all conspire to shew that, if he had no more 
 learning than what he could not help, James Boswell 
 was altogether, as Dominie Sampson said of Mannering, 
 *a man of considerable erudition despite of his im- 
 perfect opportunities.' 
 
 Nor were his entire interests Johnsonian. Scattered 
 through his writings we find allusions to other books, 
 in a more or less forward stage of completeness, and of 
 which some must have been destroyed by his faithless 
 executors. We hear of a Life of Lord Kames ; an 
 Essay on the Profession of an Advocate; Memoirs of 
 Hume when dying, ' which I may some time or other 
 communicate to the world;' a quarto with plates on 
 The Beggars Opera ; a History of James IV., ( the 
 patron of my family;' a Collection of Feudal Tenures 
 and Charters, 'a valuable collection made by my 
 father, with some additions and illustrations of my 
 own ; ' an Account of my Travels, ' for which I had a 
 variety of materials collected ; ' a Life of Sir Robert 
 Sibbald, 'in the original manuscript in his own writ- 
 ing ; ' a History of the Rebellion of 1745; an edition of 
 Walton's Lives; a Life of Thomas Ruddiman, the Latin 
 grammarian ; a History of Sweden, where three of his 
 
156 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 ancestors had settled, who took service under Gustavus 
 Adolphus ; an edition of Johnson's Poems, * a complete 
 edition, in which I shall with the utmost care ascertain 
 their authenticity, and illustrate them with notes and 
 various readings ; ' a work on Addisorfs Poems, in 
 which * I shall probably maintain the merit of Addison's 
 poetry, which has been very unjustly depreciated. 1 
 His Journal, which is unfortunately lost, he designed 
 as the material for his own Autobiography. A goodly 
 list, and a varied one, involving interest, knowledge, 
 and research, fit to form the equipment of a professed 
 scholar. 
 
 Boswell foresaw the danger, and he justified his method 
 of reporting conversations. * It may be objected by some 
 persons, as it has been by one of my friends, that he who 
 has the power of thus exhibiting an exact transcript of 
 conversations is not a desirable member of society. I 
 repeat the answer which I made to that friend : 
 'Few, very few, need be afraid that their sayings will 
 be recorded. Can it be imagined that I would take 
 the trouble to gather what grows on every hedge, 
 because I have collected such fruits as the Nonpareil 
 and the Bon Chretien ? On the other hand, how 
 useful is such a faculty, if well exercised ! To it we 
 owe all those interesting apophthegms and memorabilia 
 of the ancients, which Plutarch, Xenophon, and Valerius 
 Maximus, have transmitted to us. To it we owe all 
 those instructive and entertaining collections which the 
 French have made under the title of Ana, affixed to 
 some celebrated name. To it we owe the Table-Talk 
 of Selden, the Conversation between Ben Jonson and 
 Drummond of Hawthornden, Spence's Anecdotes of 
 Pope, and other valuable remains in our own language. 
 How delighted should we have been, if thus introduced 
 into the company of Shakespeare and of Dryden, of 
 
JAMES BOSWELL 157 
 
 whom we know scarcely anything but their admirable 
 writings ! What pleasure would it have given us, to 
 have known their petty habits, their characteristick 
 manners, their modes of composition, and their genuine 
 opinion of preceding writers and of their contempo- 
 raries ! ' 
 
 The world in consideration of what it has gained, 
 and the recollection of what we should have acquired 
 had such a reporter been found for the talk of other 
 great men, has long since forgiven Boswell, and for- 
 gotten also his baiting the doctor with questions on all 
 points, his rebuffs and his puttings down * there is 
 your want, sir ; I will not be put to the question ; ' his 
 watching ' every dawning of communication from that 
 illuminated mind ; ' his eyes goggling with eagerness, 
 the mouth dropt open to catch every syllable, his ear 
 almost on the shoulder of the doctor, and the final 
 burst of * what do you do there, sir, go to the table, 
 sir, come back to your place, sir.' 
 
 And these conversations which he reported in his 
 short-hand, yet * so as to keep the substance and lan- 
 guage of discourse ? ' How far did he Johnsonize the 
 form or matter ? The remark by Burke to Mackintosh, 
 that Johnson was greater in BoswelFs books than in 
 his own, the absence of the terse and artistic touch to 
 the sayings of the Rambler in the pages of Hawkins, 
 Thrale, Murphy and others, suggest inevitably that they 
 have been touched up by their reporter. The Boswell- 
 iana supplies here some slight confirmation of this, for 
 there have been preserved in that collection stories that 
 reappear in the Life, and the final form in which they 
 appear in the later book is always that of a pointed 
 and improved nature. It would, therefore, seem that 
 Boswell, whose imitations of Johnson Mrs Thrale 
 declared in some respects superior to Garrick's, in his 
 
158 FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 long devotion to the style and manner of his friend, 
 inflated with the Johnsonian ether/ did consciously 
 or otherwise add much to the originals, and so has 
 denied himself a share of what would otherwise be 
 justly, if known, set down to his credit. 
 
 ' I own/ he writes in 1789 to Temple, 'I am desirous 
 that my life should tell.' He counted doubtless on the 
 Autobiography for this purpose. * It is a maxim with 
 me/ said the great Bentley, 'that no man was ever 
 written out of reputation but by himself/ At first sight 
 it would appear that Boswell had inflicted upon his 
 own fame an indelible blot. From whom but himself 
 should we ever have learned those failings, of which 
 Macaulay has deftly made so much in his unsympathetic 
 writing down of the man, after the manner of the 
 Johnsonian attack on Milton and Gray ? In whom but 
 himself should we detect the excrescences in his works 
 the permutations and combinations in shaving, the 
 wish for a pulley in bed to raise him, his puzzle over 
 the disproportionate wages of footmen and maid- 
 servants, his boastings, his family pride, his hastily writ- 
 ing in the sage's presence Johnson's parody of Hervey 
 in the Meditations on a Pudding^ his superstitions, and 
 his weaknesses ? It is this that has cost him so dear 
 with the critics, and the superior people, * empty weari- 
 some cuckoos, and doleful monotonous owls, innumer- 
 able jays also and twittering sparrows of the housetops.' 
 He compares his own ideas to his handwriting, irregular 
 and sprawling; his nature to Corinthian brass, made 
 up of an infinite variety of ingredients, and his head to 
 a tavern which might have been full of lords drinking 
 Burgundy, but has been invaded by low punch-drinkers 
 whom the landlord cannot expel. Blots and inequalities 
 there are in the great book. Cooper off the prairie, 
 Gait out of Ayrshire, are not more untrue to themselves 
 
JAMES BOS WELL 159 
 
 than is Boswell at such moments. But * within the focus 
 of the Lichfield lamps ' he regains his strength like a 
 Samson. 
 
 Boswell, with all his experience, never attained the 
 mellow Sadduceeism of the diner-out. As a reward, 
 he never lost the literary conscience, the capacity for 
 labour, the assiduity and veracity that have set his 
 work upon a pedestal of its own. The dedication to 
 Reynolds, a masterly piece of writing, will shew the 
 trouble that he took over his method, ' obliged to run 
 half over London in order to fix a date correctly/ 
 And he knew the value of his work, which the man 
 with the note-book never does. In his moments of 
 self-complacency he could compare his Johnsoniad 
 with the Odyssey ; and he will not repress his 'satis- 
 faction in the consciousness of having largely provided 
 for the instruction and entertainment of mankind.' 
 Literary models before him he had none. Scott 
 suggests the life of the philosopher Demophon in 
 Lucian, but Boswell was not likely to have known it. 
 He modestly himself says he has enlarged on the plan 
 of Mason's Life of Gray ; but his merits are his own. 
 For the history of the period it is, as Cardinal Duperron 
 said of Rabelais, le livre the book 'in worth as a 
 book,' decides Carlyle, 'beyond any other production 
 of the eighteenth century.' 
 
 Time has dealt gently with both Johnson and 
 Boswell. ' The chief glory of every people,' said the 
 former in the preface to his Dictionary ' arises from its 
 authors : whether I shall add anything to the reputa- 
 tion of English literature must be left to time.' In 
 the constituency of the present no dead writer addresses 
 such an audience as Johnson does. Of Johnson Boswell 
 might have said, as Cervantes did of his great creation 
 Don Quixote, he and his subject were born for each 
 
1 6o FAMOUS SCOTS 
 
 other. There is no greater figure, no more familiar 
 face in our literature than ' the old man eloquent ' ; 
 and as the inseparable companion 'held in my heart 
 of hearts, whose fidelity and tenderness I consider as 
 a great part of the comforts which are yet left to me/ 
 rises the figure of his biographer, the 'Bozzy no more 
 of countless follies and fatuities, but Boswell, the prince 
 of biographers, the inheritor of unfulfilled renown, now 
 become, like his hero himself, an ancient. And they 
 are still in the heyday of their great fame. Along the 
 stream of time the little bark, as he hoped, sails 
 attendant, pursues the triumph and partakes the gale. 
 With James Boswell it has happened, as Mark 
 Pattison says of Milton, to have passed beyond the 
 critics into a region of his own. That 'mighty civil 
 gentlewoman,' the mistress of the Green Man at Ash- 
 bourne, M. Killingley, who waited on him with the 
 note of introduction to his extensive acquaintance 
 4 a singular favour conferred on one who has it not in 
 her power to make any other return but her most 
 grateful thanks, &c./ is but a symbol of the feelings 
 of the readers who ever wish well to the name and the 
 fame of James Boswell. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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