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 criticism 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 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.

Mull, Tobermory, Ulva's Isle, and Inch Kenneth followed. Then Iona,—'the sacred place which as long as I can remember, I had thought on with veneration.' 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 barn with a portmanteau for a pillow, and '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 conversation 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, I reflected with much satisfaction, that the solemn scenes of piety 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 '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 nonplussed. 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 showman. Read in the original, as a revelation of the writer's character, the very reverse is the impression; 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 impression 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 contemptuous way in which his relations had been tossed by the doctor, and that Bozzy's own subsequent denunciations 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 Boswell's own words—

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 Boswell's 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 ascended it. The Saracen's 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. 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 '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 maintained, 'the first Whig was the Devil!'

Edinburgh was reached on November 9th. 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 weariness, 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 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 considerable 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 discernment 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 Boswell's 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 performance, 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 Iona. 'The man whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona,' rivals Macaulay's New Zealander as a stock quotation, and the whole book is not without incisive touches. But it is completely 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 seen in the Life. The artistic opening, and the grouping of the characters, together with the wealth of archæological and historical information, the tripping style and sustained interest, all render this book of Boswell's a masterpiece. Johnson's account, published in 1775, took ten years to reach a second edition. Boswell's 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 Gentleman's 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 half of really good weather, and but the same during October. Out of such slight materials and uncomfortable 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 '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 Iona; 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 attaching to the Rambler even in Abyssinia and to his foot-steps in Scotland.

CHAPTER VI

EDINBURGH LIFE—DEATH OF JOHNSON. 1773-1784

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 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 Iona 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 bar 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 'exalted 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 Iona 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 breakfasting with Paoli,' he writes before leaving for the north, 'and worshipping at St Paul's, I dined tête-à-tête 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 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 Montgomerie, '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 it on the drunken habits of the country which, he says, are very bad, and with the recollection of Burns' temptations 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 mankind) 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 disgraced 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 Derbyshire was all that resulted. We now find for the first time in the Life indications of what would ensue when 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 constitutional 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 precept 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 cheering 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, '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 questions, 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.' 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 in a loud and boisterous manner, desirous to let the company 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 argument, 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 30th, 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 as much force of mind as you can. Let your imports be more than your exports, and you'll never go far wrong.' 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 dissolution 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, 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.

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

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 considerable 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 Boswell'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 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 20th 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 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 Boswell's 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 repeating often to himself the lines from the Vanity of Human Wishes:—

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 Malden, 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 typographical 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 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 profession 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 concludes 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 advertisement 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 Boswell's 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, 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 '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 adhæsit 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, '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 adhæsit 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