Lord Bute told me[3] that Mr. Wedderburne, now Lord Loughborough, was the person who first mentioned this subject to him. Lord Loughborough told me that the pension was granted solely as a reward of his literary merit.... Mr. Thomas Sheridan and Mr. Murphy, COLLECTING MATERIAL who then lived a good deal both with him and Mr. Wedderburne, told me, that they previously talked with Johnson on this matter.... Sir Joshua Reynolds told me that Johnson called on him.
The mere number of names consulted is sufficiently imposing. Boswell in fact was collecting evidence for a case. He must examine all the witnesses: also he must examine them in such a way that the truth might be discovered.
Mr. Murphy and the late Mr. Sheridan severally contended for the distinction of having been the first who mentioned to Mr. Wedderburne that Johnson ought to have a pension. When I spoke of this to Lord Loughborough, wishing to know if he recollected the prime mover in the business, he said: 'All his friends assisted,' and when I told him that Mr. Sheridan strenuously asserted his claim to it, his Lordship said: 'He rang the bell.' And it is but just to add, that Mr. Sheridan told me that when he communicated to Dr. Johnson that a pension was to be granted him he replied in a fervour of gratitude.... When I repeated this to Dr. Johnson he did not contradict it.
The profusion of information about this particular point may seem to us unnecessary—it is of course controversial, and the controversy has lost much of its interest. But it shows in any case not only the great number of questions Boswell was willing to ask in order to find out exactly what had taken place and the scale upon which his investigations were conducted, but also the minute and detailed care with which he preserved the truth.
Boswell has himself said something of the labour it cost him to compile the 'Life':
The labour and anxious attention with which I have collected and arranged the materials of which these volumes are composed, will hardly be conceived by those who read them with careless facility. The stretch of mind and prompt assiduity by which so many conversations were preserved, I myself, at some distance of time, contemplate with wonder; and I must be allowed to suggest, that the nature of the work in other respects, as it consists of innumerable detached particulars, all of which, even the most minute, I have spared no pains to ascertain with a scrupulous authenticity, has occasioned a degree of trouble far beyond that of any other species of composition. Were I to detail the books which I have consulted, and the inquiries which I have found it necessary to make by various channels, I should probably be thought ridiculously ostentatious. Let me only observe, as a specimen of my trouble, that I have sometimes been obliged to run half over London in order to fix a date correctly.[4]
Something of all that Boswell meant by this can be seen more nearly in Dr. Birkbeck Hill's essay upon Boswell's Proof-sheets:
A delay was sometimes caused by his desire to 'ascertain particulars with scrupulous authenticity.' 'Sheet 777,' he wrote, 'is with Mr. Wilkes to look at a note.' ... A short delay is caused in ascertaining BOSWELL'S PROOF SHEETS the number of years the Rev. Mr. Vilette had been Ordinary of Newgate. A blank had been left in the text. On the margin Boswell wrote: 'Send my note to Mr. Vilette in the morning and open the answer. Or inquire of Mr. Akerman (the keeper of Newgate) for the number of years. Get it somehow.' ... On page 505 of the second volume Boswell writes: 'I could wish that the forme in which page 512 is were not thrown off till I have an answer from Mr. Stone, the gentleman mentioned in the note, to tell me his Christian name, that I may call him Esq.' ... In the margin of the passage in which he quotes the inscription on a gold snuff-box given to Reynolds by Catherine II., he writes, 'Pray be very careful in printing the words of the Empress of all the Russias.' ... Opposite the long note where he quotes the anonymous editor of 'Tracts by Warburton and a Warburtonian,' he writes in the margin: 'This page must not be laid on till I hear from Dr. Parr whether his name may be mentioned.' Accordingly he wrote to him requesting 'to have by return of post if I may say or guess that Dr. Parr is the editor.'
The success of these inquiries was far from certain. Dr. Parr's name does not appear.
Boswell was more fortunate in obtaining a name for another entry, which had originally stood: 'He was in this like ... who, Mr. Daines Barrington told me, used to say: 'I hate a cui bono man!' In the margin he filled up the blank with 'a respectable person'; but before the sheet was 'laid on,' he learnt this respectable person's name. In the published text he figures as 'Dr. Shaw, the great traveller.'[5]