James Boswell

by W. Keith Leask

When I thought her my own, ah! too short seemed the day
For a jaunt to Downpatrick, or a trip on the sea;
To express what I felt, then all language was vain,
'Twas in truth what the poets have studied to feign.

But, too late, I found even she could deceive,
And nothing was left but to sigh, weep, and rave;
Distracted, I flew from my dear native shore,
Resolved to see Larghan Clanbrassil no more.

Yet still in some moments enchanted I find
A ray of her fondness beams soft on my mind;
While thus in bless'd fancy my angel I see,
All the world is a Larghan Clanbrassil to me.'

On this journey with Boswell there was a Margaret—his own cousin, and it is curious to find him in this mood of sentimental philandering, were it no worse, when we have now to see Bozzy at the end of his love affairs. When his great work was completed in 1791, its author contributed to the European Magazine for May and June a little sketch of himself, in order to give a fillip to its circulation. There he describes jauntily his Irish tour, and after what we know of his erratic course, it is delightful to come across this sage chronicler of his dead wife, circulating testimonials to her excellences, to which no doubt he was oblivious in her lifetime. 'They had,' he writes, 'from their earliest years lived in the most intimate and unreserved friendship.' His love of the fair sex has been already mentioned (he had quoted the song of 'the Soapers' in our first chapter), and she was the constant yet prudent and delicate confidante of all his 'egarements du coeur et de l'esprit.' This we may doubt, and the gracefully allusive French quotation reminds us of Mr Pepys' use of that language when his wife was in his mind. This jaunt was the occasion of Mr Boswell's resolving at last to engage himself in that connection to which he had always declared himself averse. In short, he determined to become a married man. He requested her, with her excellent judgment and more sedate manners, to do him the favour of accepting him with all his faults, and though he assures his readers he had uniformly protested that a large fortune had been with him a requisite in the fair, he was yet 'willing to waive that in consideration of her peculiar merit!'

Hearts are caught in the rebound, and Bozzy had solaced his loss of the belle Irlandaise with the sympathy of his fellow-traveller. Having let his fancies roam so far abroad as Siena and Holland, the lover had now returned like the bird at evening to the nest from which it flew. She had no fortune, and 'the penniless lass wi' the lang pedigree,' related as she was to the Eglintoun branch and other high families, had not in the eyes of his father the landed qualifications of Miss Blair, whose property lay so convenient for the extension of the Boswell acres. This may have been the cause of the paternal anger and the separate marriages on the same day. The wives of literary men have ever been a fruitful source of disquisition to the admirers of their heroes, and Terentia, Gemma Donati, and Anne Hathaway, have divided the biographers of Cicero, Dante, and Shakespeare. To us it seems that, like his father, she had much to bear, hampered by their domestic difficulties through her husband's constant dependence on that father for his income, and eyed with undeserved suspicion by the judge and his second wife as a Mordecai in the gate, penniless and yet supposed to be the cause of Boswell's pecuniary embarrassments and indiscretions. The marriage was deferred till after the Stratford Jubilee, and the newly married pair took up their house in Chessel's Buildings in the Canongate. For a year and a half after his marriage his correspondence with Johnson underwent an entire cessation, and in the August of 1771 General Paoli made a tour in Scotland, which, for a time, called forth the best organizing abilities of his friend. From the London Magazine of the day, in an account contributed by our hero, we learn how Paoli had paid 'a visit to James Boswell, Esq., who was the first gentleman of this country who visited Corsica, and whose writings have made the brave islanders and their general properly known over Europe.' Boswell waited on the exile and the Polish Ambassador at Ramsay's Inn, at the foot of St Mary's Wynd, visiting with them Linlithgow and Carron, 'where the general had a prodigious pleasure in viewing the forge where were formed the cannon and war-like stores' sent to Corsica by his Scottish admirers. At Glasgow they were entertained by the professors, and saw 'the elegant printing of the Scottish Stephani, the Messrs Foulis,' and no doubt their guide managed to remind their excellencies of a certain Tour in Corsica emanating thence. Auchinleck was visited to 'the joy of my worthy father and me at seeing the Corsican Hero in our romantick groves,' as he tells Garrick, and on their return to Glasgow the freedom of the city was conferred on Paoli by Lord Provost Dunlop.[A] At Edinburgh 'the general slept under the roof of his ever grateful friend.' The whole forms a favourable specimen of Boswell's organizing capacities, and viewed in relation to the friendly intercourse he is found maintaining with prominent and influential persons, our regret is but increased that in the interests of his wife and children his abilities were not exercised in a more strictly professional channel.

London he visited in the March of 1772 over an appeal to the Lords from the Court of Session. Johnson was now in good health, and was eager 'to see Beattie's College.' In the Scots Magazine for February 1773 there is mentioned a masked ball, attended by seventy persons of quality, given in Edinburgh by Sir Alexander Macdonald and his wife, Miss Bosville of Yorkshire, one of Boswell's loves. Croker says that the masquerade for which he was rallied by Johnson was given by the Dowager Countess of Fife, and that Bozzy went as a dumb conjurer; but from the expression of the Magazine, 'an entertainment little known in this part of the Kingdom,' coupled with the words employed by Johnson, there can be no doubt that Croker is wrong, and that the host on this occasion was the churlish chief, whose inhospitable ways they were to experience in Skye. He was now near the great honour of his life, admission to that Literary Club, of which, said Sir William Jones, 'I will only say that there is no branch of human knowledge on which some of our members are not capable of giving information.' Never was honour better deserved or better repaid. Without his record the fame of that club would have passed away, surviving at best in some sort of hazy companionship with the Kit-Cat, Button's, Will's, and other clubs and assemblies. Never was there a club of which each member was better qualified to take care of his own fame with posterity. None of Johnson's associates would have hesitated in declaring an extended date of renown for the Rambler; and perhaps he himself would have staked the reputation assured, as Cowper said, by the tears of bards and heroes in order to immortalize the dead, on his Rasselas or the Dictionary. Yet he and most members of that club, apart from the record of Boswell, would be but names to the literary antiquary, and be by the mass of readers entirely forgotten.

He had canvassed the members. Johnson wrote, on April 23rd, to Goldsmith, who was in the chair that evening, to consider Boswell as proposed by himself in his absence. On the night of the ballot, April 30th, Boswell dined at Beauclerk's, where, after the company had gone to the club, he was left till the fate of his election should be announced. After Johnson had taken the thing in hand there was not much danger, yet poor Bozzy 'sat in a state of anxiety which even the charming conversation of Lady Di Beauclerk could not entirely dissipate.' There he received the tidings of his election, and he hastened to the place of meeting. Burke he met that night for the first time, and on his entrance, Johnson, 'with humorous formality, gave me a charge, pointing out the conduct expected from me as a good member of the club.' That charge we can believe Forster to be right in suspecting to be a caution against publishing abroad the proceedings and the talk of the members.

In the autumn of the year, as they drew near to Monboddo, Johnson, we should think with excessive rudeness, told him 'several of the members wished to keep you out. Burke told me, he doubted if you were fit for it: but, now you are in, none of them are sorry. Burke says, that you have so much good humour naturally, it is scarce a virtue.' The faithful Bozzy replied, 'They were afraid of you, sir, as it was you who proposed me;' and the doctor was prone to admit that if the one blackball necessary to exclude had been given, they knew they never would have got in another member. Yet even from this rebuff he managed to deftly extract a compliment. Beauclerk, the doctor said, had been very earnest for the admission, and Beauclerk, replied Boswell, 'has a keenness of mind which is very uncommon.' The witty Topham, along with Reynolds, Garrick, and others, is immortalized in the pages of the man who was not thought by the wits of Gerrard Street fit for their club.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] By the Town Clerk Depute of Glasgow, R. Renwick, Esq., we are informed that no notice of this enrolment of General Paoli was entered at the time, pursuant to the custom of the Register over honorary burgesships.