Boswell's Correspondence with the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and His Journal of a Tour to Corsica

E-text prepared by Clare Boothby, Linda Cantoni, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net/c/)
Transcriber's Notes:
Inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies of spelling, punctuation, hyphenation, capitalization, and use of diacriticals are preserved as they appear in the original text.
This e-text contains some phrases in ancient Greek. In the original text, some of the Greek characters have diacritical marks which do not display properly in some browsers. In order to make this e-text as accessible as possible, the diacritical marks have been omitted, except that the rough-breathing mark is here represented by an apostrophe at the beginning of the word. All text in Greek has a mouse-hover transliteration, e.g., καλος.
LONDON: THOS. DE LA RUE & CO. 1879 PRINTED BY THOMAS DE LA RUE AND CO., BUNHILL ROW, LONDON.

Boswell did not bring out his Life of Johnson till he was past his fiftieth year. His Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides had appeared more than five years earlier. While it is on these two books that his fame rests, yet to the men of his generation he was chiefly known for his work on Corsica and for his friendship with Paoli. His admiration for Johnson he had certainly proclaimed far and wide. He had long been off, in the words of his father, wi' the land-louping scoundrel of a Corsican, and had pinned himself to a dominie—an auld dominie who keeped a schule and cau'd it an acaadamy. Nevertheless it was to Corsica and its heroic chief that he owed the position that he undoubtedly held among men of letters. He was Corsica Boswell and Paoli Boswell long before he became famous as Johnson Boswell.
How strongly his journey and his narrative touched the hearts of people at home may still be read in Mrs. Barbauld's fine lines on Corsica:—
Boswell's work met with a rapid sale. The copyright he sold to Dilly for one hundred guineas. The publisher must have made no small gain by the bargain, for a third edition was called for within a year. My book, writes Boswell, has amazing celebrity: Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Walpole, Mrs. Macaulay, Mr. Garrick have all written me noble letters about it. With his Lordship's letter he was so much delighted that in the third edition he obtained leave to use it to enrich his book. Johnson pronounced his Journal in a very high degree curious and delightful. It is surprising that a work which thus delighted Johnson, moved Gray strangely, and amused Horace Walpole, can now be met with only in old libraries and on the shelves of a dealer in second-hand books. I doubt whether a new edition has been published in the last hundred years. It is still more surprising when we remember that it is the work of an author who has written a book that is likely to be read as long as the English exists, either as a living or as a dead language. The explanation of this, I take it, is to be found in the distinction that Johnson draws between Boswell's Account of Corsica, which forms more than two-thirds of the whole book, and the Journal of his Tour. His history, he said, was like other histories. It was copied from books. His Journal rose out of his own experience and observation. His history was read, and perhaps read with eagerness, because at the time when it appeared there was a strong interest felt in the Corsicans. In despair of maintaining their independence, they had been willing to place themselves and their island entirely under the protection of Great Britain. The offer had been refused, but they still hoped for our assistance. Not a few Englishmen felt with Lord Lyttelton when he wrote— I wish with you that our Government had shown more respect for Corsican liberty, and I think it disgraces our nation that we do not live in good friendship with a brave people engaged in the noblest of all contests, a contest against tyranny. But in such a contest as this Corsica was before long to play a different part. Scarcely four years after Boswell from some distant hill had a fine view of Ajaccio and its environs, that town was rendered famous by the birth of Napoleon Buonaparte.