James Boswell

ade of sterner stuff.

s 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 n

downward course. He struggles with himself, and feels instinctively the lack of the curb which the powerful intellect of the Rambl

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down the torre

lf-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 d

ion, 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 ego

duction. Once only does it deviate into sense when, on the last page, we find the advertisement of the Tour to the Hebrides, 'wh

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,

red 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, '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 adh?sit pavim

k 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 Wh

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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.' Remorse found vent in an agony of grief. 'She never would have left me,' he cries to Te

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 Shakespeare on Wolsey's hopes and fall-a passage which, curiously enough

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 intention.' It is impossible not to feel for Boswell at this crisis. 'I am down at an inn,' he writes to Temple, 'and ashamed and sunk on account of the disappointment of hopes which led me to endure such grievances. I deserve all that I suffer. I am at the same time distracted 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 Recordership, 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 curiously after all this reads his own little autobiographical sketch in the European Magazine! '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 declaration.' 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

d him to exertion. 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.' 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 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-'his comic-serious face having lost none of its wonted singularity, nor yet his mind and language.' She had letters from Johnson, and he mu

riter in the Athen?um for May 9th 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 respectfully but firmly from the doctor, who dr

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Reynolds, was really enormous. The capacity for sustained effort, when set to it, of which he had boasted over his condensati

et 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 speculations, paying ￡2500 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-

h, 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 age,' 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-'a few nights ago Mr Boswell returned from the Literary Club,

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

enes, his pryi

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ark,' his political and ecclesiastical aberrations from the surer and better standpoints of his family and country

ndriack, 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,' 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 Iona, 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 si

enough 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

tance with the writings and character of the man they decry, come to the complacent depreciation which, as Niebuhr 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 f