On the 25th of November 1769, after a short tour in Ireland undertaken to empty his head of Corsica (Johnson’s emphatic direction), Boswell married his cousin Margaret Montgomery at Lainshaw in Ayrshire. For some years henceforth his visits to London were brief, but on the 30th of April 1773 he was present at his admission to the Literary Club, for which honour he had been proposed by Johnson himself, and in the autumn of this year in the course of his tour to the Hebrides Johnson visited the Boswells in Ayrshire. Neither Boswell’s father nor his wife shared his enthusiasm for the lexicographer. Lord Auchinleck remarked that Jamie was “gane clean gyte ... And whose tail do ye think he has pinned himself to now, man? A dominie, an auld dominie, that keepit a schule and ca’d it an academy!” Housewives less prim than Mrs Boswell might have objected to Johnson’s habit of turning lighted candles upside down when in the parlour to make them burn better. She called the great man a bear. Boswell’s Journal of a Tour in the Hebrides was written for the most part during the journey, but was not published until the spring of 1786. The diary of Pepys was not then known to the public, and Boswell’s indiscretions as to the emotions aroused in him by the neat ladies’ maids at Inveraray, and the extremity of drunkenness which he exhibited at Corrichatachin, created a literary sensation and sent the Tour through three editions in one year. In the meantime his pecuniary and other difficulties at home were great; he made hardly more than £100 a year by his profession, and his relations with his father were chronically strained. In 1775 he began to keep terms at the Inner Temple and managed to see a good deal of Johnson, between whom and John Wilkes he succeeded in bringing about a meeting at the famous dinner at Dilly’s on the 15th of May 1776. On the 30th of August 1782 his father died, leaving him an estate worth £1600 a year. On the 30th of June 1784, Boswell met Johnson for the last time at a dinner at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s. He accompanied him back in the coach from Leicester Square to Bolt Court. “We bade adieu to each other affectionately in the carriage. When he had got down upon the foot pavement he called out ‘Fare you well’; and without looking back, sprung away with a kind of pathetic briskness, if I may use that expression, which seemed to indicate a struggle to conceal uneasiness, and impressed me with a foreboding of our long, long separation.” Johnson died that year, and two years later the Boswells moved to London. In 1789 Mrs Boswell died, leaving five children. She had been an excellent mother and a good wife, despite the infidelities and drunkenness of her husband, and from her death Boswell relapsed into worse excesses, grievously aggravated by hypochondria. He died of a complication of disorders at his house in Great Poland Street on the 19th of May 1795, and was buried a fortnight later at Auchinleck.
Up to the eve of his last illness Boswell had been busy upon his magnum opus, The Life of Samuel Johnson, which was in process of crystallization to the last. The first edition was published in two quarto volumes in an edition of 1700 copies on the 16th of May 1791. He was preparing a third edition when he died; this was completed by his friend Edmund Malone, who brought out a fifth edition in 1807. That of James Boswell junior (the editor of Malone’s Variorum Shakespeare, 1821) appeared in 1811.
The Life of Johnson was written on a scale practically unknown to biographers before Boswell. It is a full-length with all the blotches and pimples revealed (“I will not make my tiger a cat to please anybody,” wrote “Bozzy”). It may be overmuch an exhibition of oddities, but it is also, be it remembered, a pioneer application of the experimental method to the determination of human character. Its size and lack of divisions (to divide it into chapters was an original device of Croker’s) are a drawback, and have prevented Boswell’s Life from that assured triumph abroad which has fallen to the lot of various English classics such as Robinson Crusoe or Gulliver’s Travels. But wherever English is spoken, it has become a veritable sacred book and has pervaded English life and thought in the same way, that the Bible, Shakespeare and Bunyan have done. Boswell has successfully (to use his own phrase) “Johnsonized” Britain, but has not yet Johnsonized the planet. The model originally proposed to himself by Boswell was Mason’s Life of Gray, but he far surpassed that, or indeed any other, model. The fashion that Boswell adopted of giving the conversations not in the neutral tints of oratio obliqua but in full oratio recta was a stroke of genius. But he is far from being the mere mechanical transmitter of good things. He is a dramatic and descriptive artist of the first order. The extraordinary vitality of his figures postulates a certain admixture of fiction, and it is certain that Boswell exaggerates the sympathy expressed in word or deed by Johnson for some of his own tenderer foibles. But, on the whole, the best judges are of opinion that Boswell’s accuracy is exceptional, as it is undoubtedly seconded by a power of observation of a singular retentiveness and intensity. The difficulty of dramatic description can only be realized, as Jowett well pointed out, by those who have attempted it, and it is not until we compare Boswell’s reports with those of less skilful hearers that we can appreciate the skill with which the essence of a conversation is extracted, and the whole scene indicated by a few telling touches. The result is that Johnson, not, it is true, in the early days of his poverty, total idleness and the pride of literature, but in the fulness of fame and competence of fortune from 1763 to 1784, is better known to us than any other man in history. The old theory to explain such a marvel (originally propounded by Gray when the Tour in Corsica appeared) that “any fool may write a valuable book by chance” is now regarded as untenable. If fool is a word to describe Boswell (and his folly was at times transcendent) he wrote his great book because and not in despite of the fact that he was one. There can be no doubt, in fact, that he was a biographical genius, and that he arranged his opportunities just as he prepared his transitions and introduced those inimitable glosses by which Johnson’s motives are explained, his state of mind upon particular occasions indicated, and the general feeling of his company conveyed. This remarkable literary faculty, however, was but a fraction of the total make-up requisite to produce such a masterpiece as the Life. There is a touch of genius, too, in the naïf and imperturbable good nature and persistency (“Sir, I will not be baited with ’what’ and ‘why.’ ‘Why is a cow’s tail long?’ ‘Why is a fox’s tail bushy?’”), and even in the abnegation of all personal dignity, with which Boswell pursued his hero. As he himself said of Goldsmith, “He had sagacity enough to cultivate assiduously the acquaintance of Johnson, and his faculties were gradually enlarged.” Character, the vital principle of the individual, is the ignis fatuus of the mechanical biographer. Its attainment may be secured by a variety of means—witness Xenophon, Cellini, Aubrey, Lockhart and Froude—but it has never been attained with such complete intensity as by Boswell in his Life of Johnson. The more we study Boswell, the more we compare him with other biographers, the greater his work appears.
The eleventh edition of Boswell’s Johnson was brought out by John Wilson Croker in 1831; in this the original text is expanded by numerous letters and variorum anecdotes and is already knee-deep in annotation. Its blunders provoked the celebrated and mutually corrective criticisms of Macaulay and Carlyle. Its value as an unrivalled granary of Johnsoniana, stored opportunely before the last links with a Johnsonian age had disappeared, has not been adequately recognized. A new edition of the original text was issued in 1874 by Percy Fitzgerald (who has also written a useful life of James Boswell in 2 vols., London, 1891); a six-volume edition, including the Tour and Johnsoniana, was published by the Rev. Alexander Napier in 1884; the definitive edition is that by Dr Birkbeck Hill in 6 vols., 1887, with copious annotations and a model index. A generously illustrated edition was completed in 1907 in two large volumes by Roger Ingpen, and reprints of value have also been edited by R. Carruthers (with woodcuts), A. Birrell, Mowbray Morris (Globe edition) and Austin Dobson. A short biography of Boswell was written in 1896 by W. Keith Leask. Boswell’s commonplace-book was published in 1876, under the title of Boswelliana, with a memoir by the Rev. C. Rogers.
(T. Se.)
BOSWORTH, JOSEPH (1789-1876), British Anglo-Saxon scholar, was born in Derbyshire in 1789. Educated at Repton, whence he proceeded to Aberdeen University, he became in 1817 vicar of Little Horwood, Buckinghamshire, and devoted his spare time to literature and particularly to the study of Anglo-Saxon. In 1823 appeared his Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar. In 1829 Bosworth went to Holland as chaplain, first at Amsterdam and then at Rotterdam. He remained in Holland until 1840, working there on his Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language (1838), his best-known work. In 1857 he became rector of Water Shelford, Buckinghamshire, and in the following year was appointed Rawlinson professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. He gave to the university of Cambridge in 1867 £10,000 for the establishment of a professorship of Anglo-Saxon. He died on the 27th of May 1876, leaving behind him a mass of annotations on the Anglo-Saxon charters.
BOTANY (from Gr. βοτάνη, plant; βόσκειν, to graze), the science which includes everything relating to the vegetable kingdom, whether in a living or in a fossil state. It embraces a consideration of the external forms of plants—of their anatomical structure, however minute—of the functions which they perform—of their arrangement and classification—of their distribution over the globe at the present and at former epochs—and of the uses to which they are subservient. It examines the plant in its earliest state of development, and follows it through all its stages of progress until it attains maturity. It takes a comprehensive view of all the plants which cover the earth, from the minutest organism, only visible by the aid of the microscope, to the most gigantic productions of the tropics. It marks the relations which subsist between all members of the plant world, including those between existing groups and those which are known only from their fossilized remains preserved in the rocks. We deal here with the history and evolution of the science.
The plants which adorn the globe more or less in all countries must necessarily have attracted the attention of mankind from the earliest times. The science that treats of them dates back to the days of Solomon, who “spake of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall.” The Chaldaeans, Egyptians and Greeks were the early cultivators of science, and botany was not neglected, although the study of it was mixed up with crude speculations as to vegetable life, and as to the change of plants into animals. About 300 years before Christ Theophrastus wrote a History of Plants, and described about 500 species used for the treatment of diseases. Dioscorides, a Greek writer, who appears to have flourished about the time of Nero, issued a work on Materia Medica. The elder Pliny described about a thousand plants, many of them famous for their medicinal virtues. Asiatic and Arabian writers also took up this subject. Little, however, was done in the science of botany, properly so called, until the 16th century of the Christian era, when the revival of learning dispelled the darkness which had long hung over Europe. Otto Brunfels, a physician of Bern, has been looked upon as the restorer of the science in Europe. In his Herbarium, printed at Strassburg (1530-1536), he gave descriptions of a large number of plants, chiefly those of central Europe, illustrated by beautiful woodcuts. He was followed by other writers,—Leonhard Fuchs, whose Historia Stirpium (Basel, 1542) is worthy of special note for its excellent woodcuts; Hieronymus Bock, whose Kreutter Buch appeared in 1539; and William Turner, “The Father of English Botany,” the first part of whose New Herbal, printed in English, was issued in 1551. The descriptions in these early works were encumbered with much medicinal detail, including speculations as to the virtues of plants. Plants which were strikingly alike were placed together, but there was at first little attempt at systematic classification. A crude system, based on the external appearance of plants and their uses to man, was gradually evolved, and is well illustrated in the Herbal, issued in 1597 by John Gerard (1545-1612), a barber-surgeon, who had a garden in Holborn, and was a keen student of British plants.