A. Edward Newton

SITTING one evening with my favorite book and enjoying the company of a crackling wood fire, I was interrupted by a cheerful idiot who, entering unheard, announced himself with the remark, “This is what I call a library.” Indifferent to a forced welcome, he looked about him and continued, “I see you are fond of Boswell. I always preferred Macaulay’s ‘Life of Johnson’ to Boswell’s—it’s so much shorter. I read it in college.”

Argument would have been wasted on him. If he had been alone in his opinion, I would have killed him and thus exterminated the species; but he is only one of a large class, who having once read Macaulay’s essay, and that years ago, feel that they have received a peculiar insight into the character of Samuel Johnson and have a patent to sneer at his biographer.

Having a case of books by and about the dear old Doctor, I have acquired a reputation that plagues me. People ask to see my collection, not that they know anything about it, or care, but simply to please me, as they think. Climbing to unusual intellectual heights, when safe at the top, where there is said to be always room, they look about and with a knowing leer murmur, “Oh! rare Ben!” I have become quite expert at lowering them from their dangerous position without showing them the depths of their ignorance. This is a feat which demands such skill as can be acquired only by long practice.

Macaulay’s essay is anathema to me. If it were a food-product, the authorities would long since have suppressed it on account of its artificial coloring matter; but prep.-school teachers and college professors go on “requiring” its reading from sheer force of habit; and as long as they continue to do so, the true Samuel Johnson and the real James Boswell will both remain unknown.

Out of a thousand who have read this famous essay and remember its wonderfully balanced sentences, which stick in the memory like burrs in the hair, perhaps not more than one will be able to recall the circumstances under which it was written. Purporting to be a review of a new edition of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” edited by John Wilson Croker, it is really a personal attack on a bitter political enemy. Written at a time when political feeling ran high, it begins with a lie. Using the editorial “We,” Macaulay opens by saying, “We are sorry to be obliged to say that the merits of Mr. Croker’s performance are on a par with those of a certain leg of mutton on which Dr. Johnson dined while travelling from London to Oxford, and which he, with characteristic energy, pronounced to be as bad as could be.”

JAMES BOSWELL OF AUCHINLECK, ESQR. Painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Engraved by John Jones
JAMES BOSWELL OF AUCHINLECK, ESQR.
Painted by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Engraved by John Jones

Let us see how sorry Macaulay really was. In a letter written to his sister just before Croker’s book appeared he writes: “I am to review Croker’s edition of Bozzy.... I detest Croker more than cold boiled veal.... See whether I do not dust the varlet’s jacket in the next number of the ‘Edinburgh Review.’” And he did, and the cloud of dust he then raised obscured Johnson, settled on Boswell, and for a time almost smothered him.

I suspect that Macaulay prepared himself for writing his smashing article by reading Croker’s book through in half a dozen evenings, pencil in hand, searching for blemishes. After that, his serious work began. Blinded by his hatred of the editor, he makes Johnson grotesque and repulsive, and grossly insults Boswell. He started with the premise that Boswell was mean, but that his book was great. Then the proposition defined itself in his mind something like this: Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, yet his “Life of Johnson” is one of the greatest books ever written. Boswell was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, begging to be spit upon and trampled upon, yet as a biographer he ranks with Shakespeare as a dramatist; and so he goes on, until at last, made dizzy by the sweep of his verbal seesaw and the lilt of his own brutal rhetoric, he finally reaches the conclusion that, because Boswell was a great fool, he was a very great writer.

Absurdity can go no further. Well may we ask ourselves what Boswell had done to be thus pilloried? Nothing! except that he had written a book which is universally admitted to be the best book of its kind in any language.

What manner of a man was James Boswell? He was, more than most men, a mass of contradictions. It would never, I think, have been easy to answer this question. Since Macaulay answered it, in his cocksure way, and answered it wrongly, to answer it rightly is most difficult. It is so easy to keep ringing the changes on Macaulay. Any fool with a pen can do it. Some time ago, apropos of the effort being made to preserve the house in Great Queen Street, in London, in which Boswell lived when he wrote the biography, some foolish writer in a magazine said, “Boswell shrivels more and more as we look at him.... It would be absurd to preserve a memorial to him alone.”—“Shrivels!” Impossible! Johnson and Boswell as a partnership have been too long established for either member of the firm to “shrivel.” Unconsciously perhaps, but consciously I think, Boswell has so managed it that, when the senior partner is thought of, the junior also comes to mind. Johnson’s contribution to the business was experience and unlimited common sense; Boswell made him responsible for output: the product was words, merely spoken words, either of wisdom or of wit. Distribution is quite as important as production—any railroad man will tell you so. Boswell had a genius for packing and delivering the goods so that they are, if anything, improved by time and transportation.

Let me have one more fling at Macaulay. He missed, and for his sins he deserved to miss, two good things without which this world would be a sad place. He had no wife and he had no sense of humor. Either would have told him that he was writing sheer nonsense when he said, “The very wife of his [Boswell’s] bosom laughed at his fooleries.” What are wives for, I should like to know, if not to laugh at us?

But reputation is like a pendulum, and it is now swinging from Macaulay. James Boswell is coming into his own. The biographer will outlive the essayist, brilliant and wonderful writer though he be; and I venture the prophecy that, when the traveler from New Zealand takes his stand on the ruined arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s, he will have a pocket edition of Boswell with him, in which to read something of the lives of those strange people who inhabited that vast solitude when it was called London.

James Boswell was born in 1740. His father was a Scottish judge, with the title of Lord Auchinleck. Auchinleck is in Ayrshire, and the estate had belonged to the Boswells for over two hundred years when the biographer of Johnson was born. As a young man, he was rather a trial to his father, and showed his ability chiefly in circumventing the old man’s wishes. The father destined him for the law; but he was not a good student, and was fond of society; so the choice of the son was for the army.

We, however, know Boswell better than he knew himself, and we know that when he fancied that he heard the call to arms, what he really wanted was to parade around in a scarlet uniform and make love to the ladies. But even in those early days there must have been something attractive about him, for when he and his father went up to London to solicit the good offices of the Duke of Argyle to secure a commission for him, the duke is reported to have declined, saying, “My Lord, I like your son. The boy must not be shot at for three shillings and six-pence a day.”

Boswell was only twenty when he first heard of the greatness of Samuel Johnson and formed a desire to meet him; but it was not until several years later that the great event occurred. What a meeting it was! It seems almost to have been foreordained. A proud, flippant, pushing young particle, irresponsible and practically unknown, meets one of the most distinguished men then living in London, a man more than thirty years his senior and in almost every respect his exact opposite, and so carries himself that, in spite of a rebuff or two at the start, we find Johnson a few days later shaking him by the hand and asking him why he does not come oftener to see him.

PORTRAIT OF DR. JOHNSON BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, PROBABLY IDEALIZED. THE DOCTOR IS WEARING A TIE-WIG AND HOLDS A COPY OF “IRENE” Engraved by Zobel
PORTRAIT OF DR. JOHNSON BY SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, PROBABLY IDEALIZED.
THE DOCTOR IS WEARING A TIE-WIG AND HOLDS A COPY OF “IRENE”
Engraved by Zobel

The description of the first meeting between Johnson and Boswell, written many years afterwards, is a favorite passage with all good Boswellians. “At last, on Monday, the 16th of May[10] [1763], 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 toward us,—he announced his aweful 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!’”

This is a good example of Boswell’s style. In the fewest possible words he creates a picture which one never forgets. We not only hear the talk, we see the company, and soon come to know every member of it.

Without this meeting the world would have lost one of the most delightful books ever written, Boswell himself would probably never have been heard of, and Johnson to-day would be a mere name instead of being, as he is, next to Shakespeare, the most quoted of English authors. As Augustine Birrell has pointed out, we have only talk about other talkers. Johnson’s is a matter of record. Johnson stamped his image on his own generation, but it required the genius of Boswell to make him known to ours, and to all generations to come. “Great as Johnson is,” says Burke, “he is greater in Boswell’s books than in his own.” That we now speak of the “Age of Johnson” is due rather to Boswell than to the author of the “Dictionary,” “Rasselas,” and endless “Ramblers.”

Someone has said that the three greatest characters in English literature are Falstaff, Mr. Pickwick, and Dr. Johnson. Had James Boswell created the third of this great trio, he would indeed rank with Shakespeare and with Dickens; but Johnson was his own creation, and Boswell, posing as an artist, painted his portrait as mortal man has never been painted before. In his pages we see the many-sided Johnson, the great burly philosopher, scholar, wit, and ladies’ man—Boswell makes him a shade too austere—more clearly than any other man who ever lived. As a portrait-painter, Boswell is the world’s greatest artist; and he is not simply a portrait-painter—he is unsurpassed at composition, atmosphere, and color. His book is like Rembrandt’s Night Watch—the canvas is crowded, the portraits all are faultless and distinct, but there is one dominating figure standing out from the rest—one masterly, unsurpassed, and immortal figure.

Boswell, when he first met Johnson, was twenty-two years of age. A year later he writes him: “It shall be my study to do what I can to render your life happy; and if you die before me, I shall endeavor to do honor to your memory.” He kept his word. From that hour almost to the time of Johnson’s death (I say almost, for just before the end there seems to have fallen upon their friendship a shadow, the cause of which has never been fully explained), they were unreservedly friends. Superficially they had little in common, but in essentials, all that was important; and they supplemented each other as no two men have ever done before or since. Reading the Life casually, as it is usually read, one would suppose that they were very much together; but such is not the case. Birkbeck Hill, Boswell’s most painstaking editor, has calculated that, including the time when Boswell and Johnson were together in the Hebrides, they could have seen each other only for 790 days in all; and this on the assumption that Boswell, when in London, was always in Johnson’s company, which we know was not the case; moreover, when they were apart there were gaps of years in their correspondence.

Boswell, however, weaves the story of Johnson’s life so skillfully that we come to have the feeling that whenever Johnson was going to say anything important, Boswell was at his side. Johnson, in speaking of his Dictionary once said, “Why, Sir, I knew very well how to go about it and have done it very well.” Boswell could have said the same of his great work. We had no great biography before his, and in comparison we have had none since. The combination of so great a subject for portraiture and so great an artist had never occurred before and may never occur again. Geniuses ordinarily do not run in couples.

Boswell hoped that his book would bring him fame. Over it he labored at a time when labor was especially difficult for him. For it he was prepared to sacrifice himself, his friends, anything. Whatever would add to his book’s value he would include, at whatever cost. A more careful and exact biographer never lived. Reynolds said of him that he wrote as if he were under oath; and we all remember the reply he made to Hannah More, who, when she heard he was engaged in writing the life of her revered friend, urged him to mitigate somewhat the asperities of his disposition: “No, madam, I will not cut his claws or make my tiger a cat to please anyone.”

And for writing this book Boswell has been held up to almost universal scorn. His defenders have been few and faint-hearted. I have never derived much satisfaction from Boswell’s rescue (the word is Lowell’s) by Carlyle. That unhappy old dyspeptic, unable to enjoy a good dinner himself, could not forgive Boswell his gusto for the good things of life.

What were Boswell’s faults above those of other men, that stones should be thrown at him? He drank too much! True, but what of it? Who in his day did not? Johnson records that many of the most respectable people in his cathedral city of Lichfield went nightly to bed drunk.

He was an unfaithful husband! Admitted; but Mrs. Boswell forgave him, and why should not we?

He was proud! He was, but the pride of race is not unheard of in the scion of an old family; nor did he allow his pride to prevent his attaching himself to an old man who admitted that he hardly knew who was his grandfather.

He had a taste for knowing people highly placed! He had, and he came to number among his friends the greatest scholar, the greatest poet, the greatest painter, the greatest actor, the greatest historian, and most of the great statesmen of his day; and these men, though they laughed with him frequently, and at him sometimes, did not think him altogether a fool.

He was vain and foolish! Yes, and inquisitive; yet while neither wise nor witty himself, he had an exquisite appreciation of wit in others. He carried repartees and arguments with accuracy. Mrs. Thrale very cleverly said that his long-head was better than short-hand; yet, as some one has pointed out, to follow the hum of conversation with so much intelligence required unusual quickness of apprehension and cannot be reconciled with the opinion that he was simply endowed with memory.

He lived beyond his means and got into debt! I seem to have heard something of this of other men whose fathers were not enjoying a comfortable estate and whose children were not adequately provided for.

Let there be an end to a discussion of the weaknesses of Boswell. They have been sufficiently advertised and his good qualities overlooked. If a man is a genius, let his personal shortcomings be absorbed in the greatness of his work. The worst that can be fairly said of Boswell is that he was vain, inquisitive, and foolish. Let us forget the silly questions he sometimes put to Johnson, and remember how often he started something which made the old Doctor perform at his unrivaled best.

The difficulty is that Boswell told on himself. As he was speaking to Johnson one day of his weaknesses, the old man admitted that he had them, too, but added, “I don’t tell of them. A man should be careful not to tell tales of himself to his own disadvantage.” It would have been well if Boswell could have remembered this excellent bit of advice; but Johnson’s advice, whether sought or unsought, was too frequently disregarded.

One of his most intimate friends, Sir Joshua Reynolds, has testified to his truthfulness, and even a casual reader of the Life will admit that he was courageous. Tossed and gored by Johnson, as he frequently was, he always came back; and, much as he respected the old man, he was never overawed by him. He differed with him on the wisdom of taxing the American Colonies, on the merits of the novels of Fielding, on the poetry of Gray, and on many other subjects. To differ with Johnson required courage and conversational ability of no common order. Indeed, it may be doubted whether, next to Johnson himself, Boswell was not the best talker in the circle—and Johnson’s circle included the most brilliant men of his time. He was sometimes very happy in his reference to himself: as where, having brought Paoli and Johnson together, he compares himself to an isthmus connecting two great continents. Indeed, the great work is so famous as a biography of Johnson that few people realize to what an extent and how subtly Boswell has made it his own autobiography.

Johnson once said, “Sir, the biographical part of literature is what I love best.” I am inclined to think that it is so with most of us. It would have been impossible for Boswell, the biographer par excellence, not to have told in one way or another the story of his own life. He told it in his account of the island of Corsica, and in his letters to his life-long friend, Temple. These deserve to be better known than they are. They are indeed just such letters as Samuel Pepys might have written in cipher to his closest friend, whom he had already provided with a key.

The first letter of this correspondence is dated Edinburgh, 29 July, 1758, when Boswell was eighteen years of age; and the last was on his writing-desk in London when the shadow of death fell upon him, thirty-seven years later.

The manner in which these letters came to be published is interesting. An English clergyman touring in France, having occasion to make some small purchases at a shop in Boulogne, observed that the paper in which they were wrapped was a fragment of an English letter. Upon inspection a date and some well-known names were observed, and further investigation showed that the piece of paper was part of a correspondence carried on nearly a century before between Boswell and a friend, the Reverend William Johnson Temple. On making inquiry, it was ascertained that this piece of paper had been taken from a large parcel recently purchased from a hawker, who was in the habit of passing through Boulogne once or twice a year, for the purpose of supplying the different shops with paper. Beyond this no further information could be obtained. The whole contents of the parcel were immediately secured.

At the death of the purchaser of these letters they passed into the hands of a nephew, from whom they were obtained, and published in 1857, after such editing and expurgating as was then fashionable. Who did the work has never been discovered, nor does it matter, as the letters fortunately passed into the collection of J. P. Morgan, and are now, finally, being edited, together with such other letters as are available, by Professor Tinker of Yale. Students of eighteenth-century literature have good reason for believing that a volume of supreme interest is in preparation for them; for such self-revealing letters, such human documents as those of James Boswell, could have been written only by their author, or by Samuel Pepys. As these letters are little known, let me give a few excerpts from them as originally published. On one of his journeys to London, Boswell writes:—

I have thought of making a good acquaintance in each town on the road. No man has been more successful in making acquaintances easily than I have been; I even bring people quickly on to a degree of cordiality ... but I know not if I last sufficiently, though surely, my dear Temple, there is always a warm place for you.

Further along on the road he writes again:—

I am in charming health and spirits. There is a handsome maid at this inn, who interrupts me by coming sometimes into the room. I have no confession to make, my priest; so be not curious.

On his way back to Edinburgh he goes somewhat out of his way to stop again at this inn and have another look at the handsome chambermaid,—her name was Matty,—and finds that she has disappeared, as handsome chambermaids have a way of doing; but Boswell comforts himself by reflecting that he can find mistresses wherever he goes. He remembers also that he had promised Dr. Johnson to accept a chest of books of the moralist’s own selection, and to “read more and drink less.”

James Boswell. Inner Temple, London 1769.— A present from my worthy friend Temple. INSCRIPTION IN BOSWELL’S COPY OF MASON’S “ELFRIDA”
INSCRIPTION IN BOSWELL’S COPY OF MASON’S “ELFRIDA”

Again he writes from Edinburgh:—

I have talked a great deal of my sweet little mistress; I am, however, uneasy about her. Furnishing a house and maintaining her with a maid will cost me a great deal of money, and it is too like marriage, or too much a settled plan of licentiousness; but what can I do? I have already taken the house, and the lady has agreed to go in at Whitsuntide; I cannot in honour draw back.... Nor am I tormented because my charmer has formerly loved others. Besides she is ill-bred, quite a rompish girl. She debases my dignity: she has no refinement, but she is very handsome and very lively. What is it to me that she has formerly loved? So have I.

Temple’s letters to Boswell have not been preserved, but he appears to have warned him of the danger of his course, for Boswell comes back with,—

I have a dear infidel, as you say; but don’t think her unfaithful. I could not love her if she was. There is a baseness in all deceit which my soul is virtuous enough to abhor, and therefore I look with horror on adultery. But my amiable mistress is no longer bound to him who was her husband: he has used her shockingly ill; he has deserted her, he lives with another. Is she not then free? She is, it is clear, and no arguments can disguise it. She is now mine, and were she to be unfaithful to me she ought to be pierced with a Corsican poniard; but I believe she loves me sincerely. She has done everything to please me; she is perfectly generous, and would not hear of any present.

Boswell seemed to enjoy equally two very different things, namely, going to church and getting drunk. On Easter Sunday he “attends the solemn service at St. Paul’s,” and next day informs Mr. Temple that he had “received the holy sacrament, and was exalted in piety.” But in the same letter he reports that he is enjoying “the metropolis to the full,” and that he has had “too much dissipation.”

He resolves to do better when his book on Corsica appears, and he has the reputation of a literary man to support. Meanwhile, he confesses:—

I last night unwarily exceeded my one bottle of old Hock; and having once broke over the pale, I run wild, but I did not get drunk. I was, however, intoxicated, and very ill next day. I ask your forgiveness, and I shall be more cautious for the future. The drunken manners of this country are very bad.

Boswell’s affairs with chambermaids, grass widows, and women of the town moved along simultaneously with efforts to land an heiress. He asks Temple to help him in an affair with a Miss Blair. Temple did his best and failed. He reported his failure and Boswell was deeply dejected for five minutes; then he writes:

My dear friend, suppose what you please; suppose her affections changed, as those of women too often are; suppose her offended at my Spanish stateliness [italics mine]; suppose her to have resolved to be more reserved and coy in order to make me more in love.

Then he felt that he must have a change of scene, and off he was to London.

I got into the fly at Buckden [he says], and had a very good journey. An agreeable young widow nursed me, and supported my lame foot on her knee. Am I not fortunate in having something about me that interests most people at first sight in my favour?

In a letter to Mrs. Thrale, Johnson once wrote: “It has become so much the fashion to publish letters that in order to avoid it, I put as little into mine as I can.” Boswell was not afraid of publication. His fear, as he said, was that letters, like sermons, would not continue to attract public curiosity, so he spiced his highly. Did he do or say a foolish thing, he at once sat down and told Temple all about it, usually adding that in the near future he intended to amend. His comment on his contemporaries is characteristic. “Hume,” he says, “told me that he would give me half-a-crown for every page of Johnson’s Dictionary in which he could not find an absurdity, if I would give him half-a-crown for every page in which he could find one.”

He announces Adam Smith’s election to membership in the famous literary club by saying: “Smith is now of our club—it has lost its select merit.” Of Gibbon he says: “I hear nothing of the publication of his second volume. He is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our literary club to me.”

As he grows older and considers how unsuccessful his life has been, how he had failed at the bar both in Scotland and in London, he begins to complain. He can get no clients; he fears that, even were he entrusted with cases, he would fail utterly.

I am afraid [he says], that, were I to be tried, I should be found so deficient in the forms, the quirks and the quiddities, which early habit acquires, that I should expose myself. Yet the delusion of Westminster Hall, of brilliant reputation and splendid fortune as a barrister, still weighs upon my imagination. I must be seen in the Courts, and must hope for some happy openings in causes of importance. The Chancellor, as you observe, has not done as I expected; but why did I expect it? I am going to put him to the test. Could I be satisfied with being Baron of Auchinleck, with a good income for a gentleman in Scotland, I might, no doubt, be independent. What can be done to deaden the ambition which has ever raged in my veins like a fever?

But the highest spirits will sometimes flag. Boswell, the friendly, obliging, generous rouÉ, was getting old. He begins to speak of the past.

Do you remember when you and I sat up all night at Cambridge, and read Gray with a noble enthusiasm; when we first used to read Mason’s “Elfrida,” and when we talked of that elegant knot of worthies, Gray, Mason and Walpole?

“Elfrida” calls itself on the title-page, “A Dramatic Poem written on the model of the Ancient Greek Tragedy.” I happen to own and value highly the very copy of this once famous poem, which Boswell and Temple read together; on the fly leaf, under Boswell’s signature, is a characteristic note in his bold, clear hand: “A present from my worthy friend Temple.”

He becomes more than ever before the butt of his acquaintance. He tells his old friend of a trick which has been played on him—only one of many. He was staying at a great house crowded with guests.

When his father dies and he comes into his estates, he is deeply in debt; he hates Scotland, he longs to be in London, to enjoy the Club, to see Johnson, to whom he writes of his difficulties, asking his advice. Johnson gives him just such advice as might be expected.

His wife dies and Johnson dies. One by one the props are pulled from under him; he drinks, constantly gets drunk; is, in this condition, knocked down in the streets and robbed, and thinks with horror of giving up his soul, intoxicated, to his Maker. “Oh, Temple, Temple!” he writes, “is this realizing any of the towering hopes which have so often been the subject of our conversation and letters?” At last he begins a letter which he is never to finish. “I would fain write you in my own hand but really cannot.” These were the last words poor Boswell ever wrote.

But Boswell’s life is chiefly interesting where it impinges upon that of his great friend. A few months after the famous meeting in Davies’s book-shop, he started for the Continent, with the idea, following the fashion of the time, of studying law at Utrecht, Johnson accompanying him on his way as far as Harwich.

After a short time at the University, during which he could have learned nothing, we find him wandering about Europe in search of celebrities,—big game,—the hunting of which was to be the chief interest of his life. He succeeded in bagging Voltaire and Rousseau,—there was none bigger,—and after a short stay in Rome he turned North, sailing from Leghorn to Corsica, where he met Paoli, the patriot, and finally returned home, escorting ThÉrÈse Levasseur, Rousseau’s mistress, as far as London. Hume at this time speaks of him as “a friend of mine, very good-humored, very agreeable and very mad.”

Meanwhile his father, Lord Auchinleck, who had borne with admirable patience such stories as had reached him of his son’s wild ways, insisted that it was time for him to settle down; but Boswell was too full of his adventures in the island of Corsica and his meeting with Paoli, to begin drudgery at the law. His accounts of his travels made him a welcome guest at London dinner-parties, and he had finally decided to write a book of his experiences.

At last the father, by a threat to cut off supplies, secured his son’s return; but his desire to publish a book had not abated, and while he finally was admitted to the Scotch bar, we find him corresponding with his friend Mr. Dilly, the publisher, in regard to the book upon which he was busily employed. From an unpublished letter, which I was fortunate enough to secure quite recently from a book-seller in New York, Gabriel Wells, we may follow Boswell in his negotiations.

Through the kindness of my fellow collector and generous friend, Judge Patterson of Philadelphia, I own an interesting fragment of a brief in Boswell’s hand, written at about this period. It appears therefrom that Boswell had been retained to secure the return of a stocking-frame of the value of a few shillings, which had been forcibly carried off. The outcome of the litigation is not known, but the paper bears the interesting indorsement, “This was the first Paper drawn by me as an Advocate. James Boswell.”

But I am allowing my collector’s passion to carry me too far afield. The preface of Boswell’s “Account of Corsica” closes with an interesting bit of self-revelation. He says, characteristically,—

A brief contemporary criticism sums up the merits of “Corsica” in a paragraph. “There is a deal about the Island and its dimensions that one doesn’t care a straw about, but that part which relates to Paoli is amusing and interesting. The author has a rage for knowing anybody that was ever talked of.”

Boswell thought that he was the first, but he proved to be the second Englishman (the first was an Englishwoman) who had ever set foot upon the island. He visited Paoli, and his accounts of his reception by the great patriot and his conversation with the people are amusing in the extreme. To his great satisfaction it was generally believed that he was on a public mission.

On another occasion:—

The success of this publication led Boswell into some absurd extravagances which he thought were necessary to support his position as a distinguished English author. Praise for his work he skillfully extracted from most of his friends, but Johnson proved obdurate. He had expressed a qualified approval of the book when it appeared; but when Boswell in a letter sought more than this, the old Doctor charged him to empty his head of “Corsica,” which he said he thought had filled it rather too long.

Boswell wrote at least two of what we should to-day call press notices of himself. One is reminded of the story of the man in a hired dress-suit at a charity ball rushing about inquiring the whereabouts of the man who puts your name in the paper. To such an one Boswell presented this brief account of himself on the occasion of the famous Shakespeare Jubilee.

May we not suppose that several bottles of “Old Hock” contributed to his enjoyment of this occasion? Here is the other one:—

The success of “Corsica” was not very great, but it sufficed to turn Boswell’s head completely. He spent as much time in London as he could contrive to, and led there the life of a dissipated man of fashion. He quarreled with his father, and after a series of escapades with women of the town and love-affairs with heiresses, he finally married his cousin, Margaret Montgomerie, a girl without a fortune. Much to Boswell’s disgust, his father, on the very same day, married for the second time, and married his cousin.

For a time after marriage he seemed to take his profession seriously, but he deceived neither his father nor his clients. The old man said that Jamie was simply taking a toot on a new horn. Meanwhile Boswell never allowed his interest in Johnson to cool for a moment. When he was in London,—and he went there on one excuse or another as often as his means permitted,—he was much with Johnson; and when he was at home, he was constantly worrying Johnson for some evidence of his affection for him. Finally Johnson writes, “My regard for you is greater almost than I have words to express” (this from the maker of a dictionary); “but I do not chuse to be always repeating it; write it down in the first leaf of your pocketbook, and never doubt of it again.”

Neither wife nor father could understand the feeling of reverence and affection which their Jamie had for Johnson. I always delight in the story of his father saying to an old friend, “There’s nae hope for Jamie, mon. Jamie is gaen clean gyte. What do you think, mon? 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, mon? A dominie, mon—an auld dominie: he keeped a schule, and ca’d it an academy.”

Mrs. Boswell, a sensible, cold, rather shadowy person, saw but little of Johnson, and was satisfied that it should be so. There is one good story to her credit. Unaccustomed to the ways of genius, she caught Johnson, who was nearsighted, one evening burnishing a lighted candle on her carpet to make it burn more brightly, and remarked, “I have seen many a bear led by a man, but never before have I seen a man led by a bear.” Boswell was just the fellow to appreciate this, and promptly repeated it to Johnson, who failed to see the humor of it.

In 1782 his father died and he came into the estate, but by his improvident management he soon found himself in financial difficulties. Johnson’s death two years later removed a restraining influence that he much needed. He tried to practice law, but he was unsuccessful. Never an abstemious man, he now drank heavily and constantly, and as constantly resolved to turn over a new leaf.

Shortly after Johnson’s death, Boswell published his “Journal of the Tour of the Hebrides,” which reached a third edition within the year and established his reputation as a writer of a new kind, in which anecdotes and conversation are woven into a narrative with a fidelity and skill which were as easy to him as they were impossible to others.

The great success of this book encouraged him to begin, and continue to work upon, the great biography of Johnson on which his fame so securely rests. Others had published before him. Mrs. Piozzi’s “Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson” had sold well, and Hawkins, the “unclubable Knight,” as Johnson called him, had been commissioned by the booksellers of London to write a formal biography, which appeared in 1787; while of lesser publications there was seemingly no end; nevertheless, Boswell persevered, and wrote his friend Temple that his

He had been preparing for the task for more than twenty years; he had, in season and out, been taking notes of Johnson’s conversations, and Johnson himself had supplied him with much of the material. Thus in poverty, interrupted by periods of dissipation, amid the sneers of many, he continued his work. While it was in progress his wife died, and he, poor fellow, justly upbraided himself for his neglect of her.

DR. JOHNSON IN TRAVELING DRESS, AS DESCRIBED IN BOSWELL’S TOUR Engraved by Trotter
DR. JOHNSON IN TRAVELING DRESS, AS DESCRIBED IN BOSWELL’S TOUR
Engraved by Trotter

Meanwhile, a “new horn” was presented to him. He had, or thought he had, a chance of being elected to Parliament, or at least of securing a place under government; but in all this he was destined to be disappointed. It would be difficult to imagine conditions more unfavorable to sustained effort than those under which Boswell labored. He was desperately hard up. Always subject to fits of the blues, which amounted almost to melancholia, he many a time thought of giving up the task from which he hoped to derive fame and profit. He considered selling his rights in the publication for a thousand pounds. But it would go to his heart, he said, to accept such a sum; and again, “I am in such bad spirits that I have fear concerning it—I may get no profit, nay, may lose—the public may be disappointed and think I have done it poorly—I may make enemies, and even have quarrels.” Then the depression would pass and he could write: “It will be, without exception, the most entertaining book you ever read.” When his friends heard that the Life would make two large volumes quarto, and that the price was two guineas, they shook their heads and Boswell’s fears began again.

At last, on May 16, 1791, the book appeared, with the imprint of Charles Dilly, in the Poultry; and so successful was it that by August twelve hundred copies had been disposed of, and the entire edition was exhausted before the end of the year. The writer confesses to such a passion for this book that of this edition he owns at present four copies in various states, the one he prizes most having an inscription in Boswell’s hand: “To James Boswell, Esquire, Junior, from his affectionate father, the Authour.” Of other editions—but why display one’s weakness?

“Should there,” in Boswell’s phrase, “be any cold-blooded and morose mortals who really dislike it,” I am sorry for them. To me it has for thirty years been a never-ending source of profit—and pleasure, which is as important. It is a book to ramble in—and with. I have never, I think, read it through from cover to cover, as the saying is, but some day I will; meanwhile let me make a confession. There are parts of it which are deadly dull; the judicious reader will skip these without hint from me. I have, indeed, always had a certain sympathy with George Henry Lewes, who for years threatened to publish an abridgment of it. It could be done: indeed, the work could be either expanded or contracted at will; but every good Boswellian will wish to do this for himself; tampering with a classic is somewhat like tampering with a will—it is good form not to.

To James Boswell Esq: Junior, from his affectionate Father The Authour.

What is really needed is a complete index to the sayings of Johnson—his dicta, spoken or written. It would be an heroic task, but heroic tasks are constantly being undertaken. My friend Osgood, of Princeton, a ripe scholar and an ardent Johnsonian, has been devoting the scanty leisure of years to a concordance of Spenser. No one less competent than he should undertake to supervise such a labor of love.

It will be remembered that the Bible is not lacking in quotations, nor is Shakespeare; but these sources of wisdom aside, Boswell, quoting Johnson, supplies us more frequently with quotations than any other author whatever. Could the irascible old Doctor come to earth again, and with that wonderful memory of his call to mind the purely casual remarks which he chanced to make to Boswell, he would surely be amazed to hear himself quoted, and to learn that his obiter dicta had become fixed in the minds of countless thousands who perhaps have never heard his name.

I chanced the other day to stop at my broker’s office to see how much I had lost in an unexpected drop in the market, and to beguile the time, picked up a market letter in which this sentence met my eye: “The unexpected and perpendicular decline in the stock of Golden Rod mining shares has left many investors sadder if not wiser. When will the public learn that investors in securities of this class are only indulging themselves in proving the correctness of Franklin’s [sic] adage, that the expectation of making a profit in such securities is simply the triumph of hope over experience?” Good Boswellians will hardly need to be reminded that this is Dr. Johnson on marriage. He had something equally wise to say, too, on the subject of “shares”; but in this instance he was speaking of a man’s second venture into matrimony, his first having proved very unhappy.

Most men, when they write a book of memoirs in which hundreds of living people are mentioned, discreetly postpone publication until after they and the chief personages of the narrative are dead. Johnson refers to Bolingbroke as a “cowardly scoundrel” for writing a book (charging a blunderbuss, he called it) and leaving half a crown to a beggarly Scotchman to pull the trigger after his death. Boswell spent some years in charging his blunderbuss; he filled it with shot, great and small, and then, taking careful aim, pulled the trigger.

Cries of rage, anguish, and delight instantly arose from all over the kingdom. A vast number of living people were mentioned, and their merits or failings discussed with an abandon which is one of the great charms of the book to-day, but which, when it appeared, stirred up a veritable hornets’ nest. As some one very cleverly said, “Boswell has invented a new kind of libel.” “A man who is dead once told me so and so”—what redress have you in law? None! The only thing to do is to punch his head.

Fortunately Boswell escaped personal chastisement, but he made many enemies and alienated some friends. Mrs. Thrale, by this time Mrs. Piozzi, quite naturally felt enraged at Boswell’s contemptuous remarks about her, and at his references to what Johnson said of her while he was enjoying the hospitality of Streatham. The best of us like to criticize our friends behind their backs; and Johnson could be frank, and indeed brutal, on occasion. Mrs. Boscawen, the wife of the admiral, on the other hand, had no reason to be displeased when she read: “If it is not presumptuous in me to praise her, I would say that her manners are the best of any lady with whom I ever had the happiness to be acquainted.”

Bishop Percy, shrewdly suspecting that Boswell’s judgment was not to be trusted, when he complied with his request for some material for the Life, desired that his name might not be mentioned in the work; to which Boswell replied that it was his intention to introduce as many names of eminent persons as he could, adding, “Believe me, my Lord, you are not the only Bishop to grace my pages.” We may suspect that he, like many another, took up the book with fear and trembling, and put it down in a rage.

Wilkes, too, got a touch of tar, but little he cared; the best beloved and the best hated man in England, he probably laughed, properly thinking that Boswell could do little damage to his reputation. But what shall we say of Lady Diana Beauclerk’s feelings when she read the stout old English epithet which Johnson had applied to her. Johnson’s authorized biographer, Sir John Hawkins, dead and buried “without his shoes and stawkin’s,” as the old jingle goes, had sneered at Boswell and passed on; verily he hath his reward. Boswell accused him of stupidity, inaccuracy, and writing fatiguing and disgusting “rigmarole.” His daughter came to the rescue of his fame, and Boswell and she had a lively exchange of letters; indeed Boswell, at all times, seemed to court that which most men shrink from, a discussion of questions of veracity with a woman.

But on the whole the book was well received, and over his success Boswell exulted, as well he might; he had achieved his ambition, he had written his name among the immortals. With its publication his work was done. He became more and more dissipated. His sober hours he devoted to schemes for self-reform and a revision of the text for future editions. He was engaged on a third printing when death overtook him. The last words he wrote—the unfinished letter to his old friend Temple—have already been quoted. The pen which he laid down was taken up by his son, who finished the letter. From him we learn the sad details of his death. He passed away on May 19, 1795, in his fifty-fifth year.

Like many another man, Boswell was always intending to reform, and never did. His practice was ever at total variance with his principles. In opinions he was a moralist; in conduct he was—otherwise. Let it be remembered, however, that he was of a generous, open-hearted, and loving disposition. A clause in his will, written in his own hand, sheds important light upon his character. “I do beseech succeeding heirs of entail to be kind to the tenants, and not to turn out old possessors to get a little more rent.”

What were the contemporary opinions of Boswell? Walpole did not like him, but Walpole liked few. Paoli was his friend; with Goldsmith and with Garrick he had been intimate. Mrs. Thrale and he did not get along well together; he could not bear the thought that she saw more of Johnson than he, and he was jealous of her influence over him. Fanny Burney did not like him, and declined to give him some information which he very naturally wanted for his book, because she wanted to use it herself. Gibbon thought him terribly indiscreet, which, compared with Gibbon, he certainly was. Reynolds and he were firm friends—the great book is dedicated to Sir Joshua.

Of Boswell, Johnson wrote during their journey in Scotland, “There is no house where he is not received with kindness and respect”; and elsewhere, “He never left a house without leaving a wish for his return”; also, “He was a man who finds himself welcome wherever he goes and makes friends faster than he can want them”; and “He was the best traveling companion in the world.” If there is a greater test than this, I do not know it. It is summering and wintering with a man in a month. Burke said of him that “good humor was so natural to him as to be scarcely a virtue to him.” I know many admirable men of whom this cannot be said.

Several years ago, being in Ayrshire, I found myself not far from Auchinleck; and although I knew that Boswell’s greatest editor, Birkbeck Hill, had experienced a rebuff upon his attempt to visit the old estate which Johnson had described as “very magnificent and very convenient,” I determined, out of loyalty to James Boswell, to make the attempt. I thought that perhaps American nerve would succeed where English scholarship had failed.

We had spent the night at Ayr, and early next morning I inquired the cost of a motor-trip to take my small party over to Auchinleck; and I was careful to pronounce the word as though spelled Afflek, as Boswell tells us to.

“To where, sir?”

“Afflek,” I repeated.

The man seemed dazed. Finally I spelled it for him, “A-u-c-h-i-n-l-e-c-k.”

“Ah, sir, Auchinleck,”—in gutturals the types will not reproduce,—“that would be two guineas, sir.”

“Very good,” I said; “pronounce it your own way, but let me have the motor.”

We were soon rolling over a road which Boswell must have taken many times, but certainly never so rapidly or luxuriously. How Dr. Johnson would have enjoyed the journey! I recalled his remark, “Sir, if I had no duties and no reference to futurity, I would spend my life driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman.” Futurity was not bothering me and I had a pretty woman, my wife, by my side. Moreover, to complete the Doctor’s remark, she was “one who could understand me and add something to the conversation.” We set out in high spirits.

As we approached the house by a fine avenue bordered by venerable trees,—no doubt those planted by the old laird, who delighted in such work,—my courage almost failed me; but I had gone too far to retire. To the servant who responded to my ring I stated my business, which seemed trivial enough.

I might as well have addressed a graven image. At last it spoke. “The family are away. The instructions are that no one is to be admitted to the house under pain of instant dismissal.”

Means elsewhere successful failed me here.

“You can walk in the park.”

“Thanks, but I did not come to Scotland to walk in a park. Perhaps you can direct me to the church where Boswell is buried.”

“You will find the tomb in the kirk in the village.”

Coal has been discovered on the estate, and the village, a mile or two away, is ugly, and, to judge from the number of places where beer and spirits could be had, their consumption would seem to be the chief occupation of the population. I found the kirk, with door securely locked. Would I try for the key at the minister’s? I would; but the minister was away for the day. Would I try the sexton? I would; but he, too, was away, and I found myself in the midst of a crowd of barefooted children who embarrassed me by their profitless attentions. It was cold and it began to rain. I remembered that we were not far from Greenock where “when it does not rain, it snaws.”

My visit had not been a success, I cannot recommend a Boswell pilgrimage. I wished that I was in London, and bethought me of Johnson’s remark that “the noblest prospect in Scotland is the high-road that leads to England.” On that high-road my party made no objection to setting out.

I once heard an eminent college professor speak disparagingly of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson,” saying that it was a mere literary slop-pail into which Boswell dropped scraps of all kinds—gossip, anecdotes and scandal, literary and biographical refuse generally. I stood aghast for a moment; then my commercial instinct awakened. I endeavored to secure this nugget of criticism in writing, with permission to publish it over the author’s name. In vain I offered a rate per word that would have aroused the envy of a Kipling. My friend pleaded “writer’s cramp,” or made some other excuse, and it finally appeared that, after all, this was only one of the cases where I had neglected, in Boswell’s phrase, to distinguish between talk for the sake of victory and talk with the desire to inform and illustrate. Against this opinion there is a perfect chorus of praise rendered by a full choir.[11]

SAMUEL JOHNSON Painted by Sir J. Reynolds. Engraved by Heath
SAMUEL JOHNSON
Painted by Sir J. Reynolds. Engraved by Heath

The great scholar Jowett confessed that he had read the book fifty times. Carlyle said, “Boswell has given more pleasure than any other man of this time, and perhaps, two or three excepted, has done the world greater service.” Lowell refers to the “Life” as a perfect granary of discussion and conversation. Leslie Stephen says that his fondness for reading began and would end with Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote: “I am taking a little of Boswell daily by way of a Bible. I mean to read him now until the day I die.” It is one of the few classics which is not merely talked about and taken as read, but is constantly being read; and I love to think that perhaps not a day goes by when some one, somewhere, does not open the book for the first time and become a confirmed Boswellian.

“What a wonderful thing your English literature is!” a learned Hungarian once said to me. “You have the greatest drama, the greatest poetry, and the greatest fiction in the world, and you are the only nation that has any biography.” The great English epic is Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.”

Inscription to Edmund Burke, by James Boswell