Here is another specimen of Boswell's wit: 'A modern man of taste found fault with the avenues at Auchinleck, and said he wished to see straggling trees. 'I wish,' said Boswell, 'I could see straggling fools in this world.'
That is Boswell at his worst.
Why a man who had so much natural humour as Boswell had should have failed so completely to discriminate when his own wit was in question must remain as much a problem to us as is the failure of many a poet to criticise his own writings—the explanation may be perhaps that it requires some special effort of the mind which can but rarely be made and which is impossible after the moment of composition. Boswell certainly seems to have had a high opinion of his efforts to be witty; his verses to Miss Monckton are inserted in the 'Life' with evident pride, and without any excuse of some connection with Johnson such as he usually makes when alluding to his own performances, and he seems frequently to have sung the songs which he composed, obtaining, no doubt, in this way the 'conspicuousness' which he desired.[36]
The enjoyment which Boswell had in public at Stratford and at the mayoralty dinner and in private, no doubt, on many occasions of which unfortunately we have no account, is perhaps best illustrated and best understood from a single sentence of his own in one of the 'Letters to Temple':
I was the great man (as we used to say) at the late Drawing-Room, in a suit of imperial blue lined with rose-coloured silk, and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons.
For the eagerness which Boswell had to reveal to others anything about himself which he was proud of, and a sort of inevitable obtrusiveness in him, Johnson with his usual shrewdness found an excellent parallel which is faithfully recounted in the 'Life':
Once when checking my boasting too frequently of myself in company, he said to me, 'Boswell, you often vaunt so much as to provoke ridicule. You put me in mind of a man who was standing in the kitchen of an inn with his back to the fire, and thus accosted the person next him, "Do you know, sir, GULLIBILITY who I am?" "No, sir," said the other, "I have not that advantage." "Sir," said he, "I am the great Twalmley, who invented the New Floodgate Iron."'
Endowed with these qualities of unsuspecting simplicity and open-mouthed vanity, Boswell naturally became, as we have seen, an object of mirth to his fellow-lawyers. When they took away his wig he did indeed half suspect a trick; but how confident and innocent and entirely unsuspicious he is when he boldly pleads for the writ, 'Quare adhaesit pavimento.' His own story of the storm during the sail to Mull, told in the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' illustrates perhaps better than any other the childish confidence of his conduct. Boswell, though filled with undisguised terror, still ardently wished to play the man and be the hero, and he thought, no doubt, as he stood holding the rope in expectation of the captain's command, that the post assigned to him was one of vital importance.
As I saw them all busy doing something, I asked Col, with much earnestness, what I could do. He, with a happy readiness, put into my hand a rope, which was fixed to the top of one of the masts, and told me to hold it till he bade me pull. If I had considered the matter, I might have seen that this could not be of the least service; but his object was to keep me out of the way of those who were busy working the vessel, and at the same time to divert my fear by employing me and making me think that I was of use. Thus did I stand firm to my post, while the wind and rain beat upon me, always expecting a call to pull my rope.'
The vanity and simplicity of Boswell no doubt obtruded themselves very frequently in his behaviour; and they caused a certain expansiveness and recklessness of conversation which would be interpreted at once as thoughtless and foolish. We have an admirable glimpse into the kind of atmosphere produced by his talk in a story which he tells of a snub he received from Colman: