Of Boswell’s personal aspects, the full length portrait by Langton, engraved for this volume, is understood to convey a correct representation. Rather above the middle height, and inclined to corpulency, he walked with a stately gait, and in his costume observed the latest fashion. He had a large head, and wore a powdered wig; his prominent but well set features beamed with perpetual good humour. “It was impossible,” remarked a contemporary, “to look in his face without being moved by the comicality which always reigned upon it.”[101] He talked much and with rapidity, but his observant faculty was not apparent to those who only met him in society.
Boswell left two sons and three daughters; James, the younger son, entered Brazenose College, Oxford, of which he was elected a fellow upon the Vinerian foundation. He was afterwards called to the English Bar, and became a Commissioner of Bankruptcy. An accomplished scholar and of industrious habits, he was by Mr. Malone appointed his literary executor. Under his care appeared Mr. Malone’s enlarged edition of Shakespeare, completed in 1821, in twenty-one octavo volumes. In the first volume he defended, in an able and ingenious essay, Mr. Malone’s reputation from an attack made on his statements and opinions by a writer of eminence. He inherited his father’s bonhommie and love of sociality. He died unmarried in the Middle Temple, London, on the 24th February, 1822, aged forty-three; his remains were deposited in the Temple Church. By his elder brother his death was lamented in these lines,—
“There is a pang when kindred spirits part,
And cold philosophy we must disown;
There is a thrilling spot in every heart,
For pulses beat not from a heart of stone.
“Boswell, th’ allotted earth has closed on thee,
Thy mild but generous warmth has passed away:
A finer spirit never death set free,
And now the friend we honour’d is but clay.