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.”