To understand what he meant by this, an attitude perhaps not only towards himself, but to the public also, since he wished very much that those who read his book should feel that it was true in every detail, we must examine more nearly Boswell's method of carrying out his biographical plan.
It is remarkable that Boswell should have begun his system of recording when quite a young man. A man of forty is more easily forgiven some eccentricity than one of two-and-twenty. Yet we find Boswell, during his travels on the Continent, tablets in hand on his first visit to Paoli, who gives an amusing account of him:
He came to my country and he fetched me some letter of recommending him: but I was of the belief he might be an impostor, and I supposed in my minte, he was an espy; for I look away from him and in a moment I look to him again, and I behold his tablets. Oh! he was to the work of writing down all I say! Indeed I was angry. But soon I discover he was no impostor and no espy; and I only find I was myself the monster he had come to discover. Oh—he is a very good man, I love him indeed; so cheerful! so gay! so pleasant! but at the first, oh! indeed I was angry.[1]
Boswell's method of recording conversations was not completed in these memoranda taken down at the moment. He had, besides these, his journal. It has been remarked already that he began to keep this regularly as early as 1758 during his tour on the Northern Circuit in the company of his father and Lord Hailes, and he tells us something of it at the time of his journey to Greenwich with Johnson in 1763:
I was the more sensible of it (the cold) from having sat up all the night before recollecting and writing in my journal what I thought worthy of preservation; an exertion which, during the first part of my acquaintance with Johnson, I frequently made. I remember having sat up four nights in one week, without being much incommoded in the daytime.
In the 'Tour to Corsica,' also, he tells us:
From my first setting out on this tour, I wrote down every night what I had observed during the day, throwing together a great deal, that I might afterwards select at leisure.[2]
We have then two processes mentioned by which Boswell recorded conversation: the notes taken down REPORTING CONVERSATION at the moment, and the journal written up at night. The relation of these two—the function which each of them performed—is not difficult to conjecture.
Boswell's object was to get his records written up as soon as possible after the events or conversations which he was describing:
I found, from experience, that to collect my friend's conversation so as to exhibit it with any degree of its original flavour, it was necessary to write it down without delay. To record his sayings, after some distance of time, was like preserving or pickling long-kept or faded fruits, or other vegetables, which, when in that state, have little or nothing of their taste when fresh.[3]