He dined with the general and suite. In spite of, perhaps by very reason of, his protestations of having no diplomatic mission, the highest attention was shewn him as an accredited envoy from St James'. In the morning chocolate was served up to him on a silver salver with the national arms; he rode out on the general's horse, with guards marching before him. Paoli knew sufficient English to maintain the dialogue, having picked up some slight knowledge of the tongue from Irish refugee officers in the Neapolitan service. His library was turned over by his inquisitive guest, who found among the books some odd volumes of The Spectator and The Tatler, Pope's Essay on Man, Gulliver's Travels, and Barclay's Apology for the Quakers. His good humour, as it had won on the general, endeared the supposed ambasciadore Inglese to the peasants, and he had a Corsican dress made for him. Of that dress—'in which I walked about with an air of true satisfaction'—every one who has heard of James Boswell has read, and it is inseparable somehow from our conceptions of the man and writer.
We select from this Corsican Tour—the least known to the general reader of Boswell's three great works—what seems to us the gem of the book:—'One day they must needs hear me play upon my German flute. To have told my honest natural visitants, 'Really, gentlemen, I play very ill,' and put on such airs as we do in our genteel companies, would have been highly ridiculous. I therefore immediately complied with their request. I gave them one or two Italian airs, and then some of our beautiful old Scots tunes, Gilderoy, The Lass o' Patie's Mill, Corn Riggs are Bonny.' The pathetick simplicity and pastoral gaiety of the Scots musick will always please those who have the genuine feelings of nature. The Corsicans were charmed with the specimens I gave them, though I may now say that they were very indifferently performed. My good friends insisted also to have an English song from me. I endeavoured to please them in this, too. I sung them 'Hearts of Oak are our Ships, Hearts of Oak are our Men.' I translated it into Italian for them, and never did I see men so delighted as the Corsicans were. 'Cuore di querco,' cried they, 'bravo Inglese!' It was quite a joyous riot. I fancied myself to be a recruiting sea officer. I fancied all my chorus of Corsicans aboard the British fleet.'
How admirable is the style of all this, equal quite to Goldsmith's best and lightest touch! Exquisite, too, is that picture of Bozzy, as the rollicking British stage-tar of tradition, in his rendering of Garrick's song, the gems from the Opera and the national melodies. Allan Ramsay's song in Corsica is to be equalled only by Goldsmith on his tour when he played, but not for amusement, Barbara Allan and Johnny Armstrong's Good Night before the doors of Italian convents and Flemish homesteads.
But the highstrung Bozzy had to experience a revulsion of low feelings to which he was ever prone. He is soon in a sort of Byronic fit, and he continues in a strain with which we should have not credited the 'gay classic friend of Jack Wilkes' and of that Sienese signora, unless he had turned evidence against himself. He declared his feelings to Paoli, as he had done to Johnson, whose curt advice had been not to confuse or resolve the common consequences of irregularity into an unalterable decree of destiny. To the general he now attributed his feeling of the vanity of life, the exhaustion in the very heat of youth of all the sweets of being, and the incapacity for taking part in active life to his 'metaphysical researches,' his reasoning beyond his depth on such subjects as it is not given to man to know. These hesitances the other wisely pushed aside with the soldierly advice to strengthen his mind by the perusal of Livy and Plutarch. In return Bozzy gave an imitation of 'my revered friend Mr Samuel Johnson,' little dreaming that all three would one day be intimate in London, and the general's house in Portman Square be always at the traveller's disposal. From the palace, as he styles it, of Paoli, Nov. 1765 he wrote to Johnson, as he had done before, 'from a kind of superstition agreeable to him as to myself,' from what he calls loca solennia—places of solemn interest. 'I dare to call this a spirited tour. I dare to challenge your approbation;' and, reading it twenty years later in the original which the old man had preserved, he found it full of 'generous enthusiasm.' No account of the continental travels of Boswell would be complete without the reproduction of his letter to the doctor from Wittenberg. It is one of the most important for the more subtle shades of psychology in the writer's character.
'Sunday, Sept. 30, 1764.
My ever dear and much respected Sir,—You know my solemn enthusiasm of mind. You love me for it, and I respect myself for it, because in so far I resemble Mr Johnson. You will be agreeably surprized when you learn the reason of my writing this letter. I am at Wittenberg in Saxony. I am in the old church where the Reformation was first preached, and where some of the Reformers lie interred. I cannot resist the serious pleasure of writing to Mr Johnson from the tomb of Melancthon. My paper rests upon the gravestone of that great and good man who was undoubtedly the best of all the Reformers.... At this tomb, then, my ever dear and respected friend! I vow to thee an eternal attachment. It shall be my study to do what I can to render your life happy: and if you die before me, I shall endeavour to do honour to your memory and, elevated by the remembrance of you, persist in noble piety. May God, the father of all beings, ever bless you! and may you continue to love your most affectionate friend, and devoted servant,—James Boswell.'
So early had Boswell made his resolve to be the biographer of Johnson. On the very day of his introduction to him, he had taken notes of all that had passed in Davies' back-parlour. He was none of the men that do things by halves, and blunder into a kind of success, as some of his depreciators have thought.
Six weeks he had been in Corsica. The first day of December saw him land at Genoa on his return, Lyons was reached on the third day of the new year, Paris one week later. Here Rousseau who had preceded him to London had provided him with a curious commission, the bringing over into England of his mistress Therese Levasseur. The easy-going Hume thus announces the fact to his friend the Countess de Boufflers. 'Mademoiselle sets out with a friend of mine, a young gentleman, very good humoured, very agreeable, and very mad. He has such a rage for literature that I dread some event fatal to my friend's honour. For remember the story of Terentia who was first married to Cicero, then to Sallust, and at last in her old age married a young nobleman, who imagined that she must possess some secret which would convey to him eloquence and genius.' A letter he found waiting from Johnson, together with one announcing the death of his mother. No more was heard about a second year at Utrecht. He crossed to London, and was again with his old friend, who had moved from the Temple to a good house in Johnson's Court, in Fleet Street. Goldsmith was no longer the obscure writer whom he had left behind, but the author of the Vicar of Wakefield and the Traveller. The club had been founded. He was encouraged by the sage to publish his account of his travels in Corsica—'you cannot go to the bottom, but all that you tell us will be new.'
He dined at the Mitre as of old, and presented Temple to Johnson. No word about his companion across the Channel, naturally enough, reached the old man's ears, but he mentioned Rousseau; though he recognised he was now in a new moral atmosphere where every attempt was resented to 'unhinge or weaken good principles.' On a modified defence of the philosopher, whose works he professed had afforded him edification, he did venture, but thinking it enough to defend one at a time Boswell said nothing 'of my gay friend Wilkes.' In the Paris salons of that winter Wilkes, Sterne, Foote, Hume, and Rousseau, had been the received lions. Hume had taken up the wild philosopher whose melodramatic Armenian dress had been the attraction at the houses of the leaders of society, the ladies who (says Horace Walpole who was there this year) 'violated all the duties of life and gave very pretty suppers.' It was the day of Anglomania on the Continent, when the name of Chatham was a name to conjure with, and Hume was expounding deism to the great ladies,—'when the footmen were in the room,' adds the shocked Horace,—lionizing Hume 'who is the only thing they believe in implicitly; which they must do, for I defy them to understand any language that he speaks,' in allusion to the broad Scottish accent of the philosopher.
The fantastic attire of Rousseau may have suggested to Bozzy the Corsican dress in his valise, or he may have construed into a command, willingly enough, the hint Paoli had dropped to let them know at home how affairs were going. He waited on Chatham with it, and was received pompously but graciously, says the Earl of Buchan who was present, for a touch of melodrama was not uncongenial to the great minister, the 'Pericles of Great Britain,' as the general had styled him. Bozzy thanked him 'for the very genteel manner in which you are pleased to treat me.' In return, Chatham eulogized Paoli as one of Plutarch's men, as Cardinal de Retz had said of Montrose.