Captain Archibald exclaimed Good G—[.] Dempster hid his head — then look’d odd & said we would be lashed. Miss Dempster screamed out.
Temple said he was vexed at it. But could not justly tell till he saw them.
Dempster said it was a most imprudent publication. That it was a most innocent one. That it was a good-humoured one which would put the world in ill humour. That it might be easy to turn the tide & get us great applause. That there was no subject discussed no character drawn & that the name of Don.1 occurred in every page. That he laughed half an hour at the elements.2 That the Ode to fear3 was a most masterly production & that the letter about turning on the heel,4 was equal to Swift. Middleton the surgeon5 said they must be some old political ones[.] Pitfour thanked G— that he was related to none of the partys. Nairne said it was very wrong to publish. Lord Sutherland6 said he did not know I was in town till he saw me in print. You see me My Lord[,] said I, in good company. Lord Dunmore7 said he had seen us in the papers, but had not yet sent[.]8 I said it is whimsical My Lord. Lord Eglint[oune] ‘How do you do Jamie? Why Jamie you have been playing the very devil You & Erskine. You have been publishing private letters between you.’ B. My Lord it is not something very terrible? Eglint. Upon My soul Jamie I would not take the direction of you upon any account, for as much as I like you, except you would agree to give over that damned publishing. Lady N[orthumberland] would as soon have a Raven in her house as an Author. By G— I heard it asserted today in a public assembly that you had done it for money. Your father would give you none; & Erskine’s Regt. was going to be broke. I wonder realy at Erskine for he seems to be a douse9 sagacious fellow[.] B Poor fellow! My Lord I’ve led him into the scrape[.] I’ve perswaded him[.] Eglint He cannot be very sensible if you have perswaded him. You must get it supprest, or put in an advertisement in the papers denying it. By the Lord it’s a thing Dean Swift could not do. To publish a collection of letters upon nothing. Nor Madam Sevigné10 either. B. My Lord her’s are very fine. Eglint. Yes a few at the beginning; but when you read on, you think her a da—ned tiresome Bitch.
Dr. Blair said ‘I see the great Donaldson makes a figure now. I’m realy vexed at the publication.’ Bos – O Doctor I’m sure they are innocent[.] Blair. They are not only innocent Sir; but very lively: But the world will not take them as you give them. You know the letters of remarkable men such as Pope to Swift[,] Cicero to Brutus11 are much sought after. We there see Men who have made a great noise in the world, as it were in their nightgowns. But what are you to the World. It is true you may say, Here are We The Hon &c who will publish our letters which will have as much wit perhaps as any, and then let your great people publish their’s[.] But it does not carry that look. It appears to those who do not know you, as if you were two vain forward young Men that would be pert & disagreeable & whom one would wish to keep out of the way of. Now God knows you have nothing of that. It is a mere lusus.12 Why Sir said I the stronger the argument against it, the stronger is the ridicule of doing such a thing. Then came the Public Advertizer,13 then Baldwin who said he would sell two for one. Noble laughed hearty at the black Pudding.14 Then I met Pitfour & brazen’d out. [B]: Are you not obliged to us? and you see we get praise even from the impartial English[.] P Well two [or] three such instances may turn the scale.
Lady Margt.15 said she’d buy to be instructed. I said they were fancifull. Crookshanks said ’twas right to amuse oneself with Publication. Some grave Dons at Flexney’s said Stuff16
1. Don: Alexander Donaldson.
2. the elements: Kames’s Elements of Criticism. Erskine expressed various cavils with this work in a letter to Boswell of 7 July 1762, published as Letter xxxviii in Letters Between the Honourable Andrew Erskine, and James Boswell Esq. (1763) (‘Letters E–B’) (The General Correspondence of James Boswell, 1757–1763, ed. David Hankins and James J. Caudle (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 300).
3. Ode to fear: Erskine’s ten-stanza ‘Ode to Fear’ appeared with Letter ix of Letters E–B (3 Dec. 1761; General Correspondence, pp. 146–52).
4. turning on the heel: In Letter xxvi (1 May 1762; General Correspondence, pp. 229–34), Erskine sought to dissuade Boswell from pursuing an army career with a comical poem, the third stanza of which begins:
Trust me, ’twill be a foolish sight,
To see you facing to the right;
And then, of all your sense bereft,
Returning back unto the left;
Alas! what transport can you feel,
In turning round on either heel?
5. Middleton the surgeon: David Middleton (?1704–85), Scots-born serjeant surgeon to George III, and later surgeon general to the army. Boswell met him again in March 1778, dining with Sir John Pringle.
6. Lord Sutherland: Lieutenant Colonel William Sutherland (1735–66), 18th Earl of Sutherland, Scottish military officer, from 23 April of this year aide-de-camp to George III, and a Scots representative peer.
7. Lord Dunmore: John Murray (1730–1809), 4th Earl of Dunmore, Scots representative peer 1761–74 and 1776–90. He would be the last British governor of Virginia, and in 1775 issued the famous proclamation that offered freedom to enslaved Africans who joined his loyalist army. He served later as governor of the Bahamas.
8. sent: That is, sent word; been in touch.
9. douse: Scots, meaning in this sense ‘sober, sensible’.
10. Madam Sevigné: Marie de Rabutin-Chantel (1626–96), marquise de Sévigné, seventeenth-century French letter writer, widely admired (though plainly not by Eglinton) as a model of excellence in familiar correspondence.
11. Pope to Swift[,] Cicero to Brutus: Letters Between Dr. Swift, Mr. Pope, &c. From the Year 1714 to 1736. Published from a Copy Transmitted from Dublin first appeared in London in 1741, its publication evidently having been secretly orchestrated by Pope. Cicero’s letters to Brutus beginning in the spring of 43 bc (the year in which Cicero was put to death) cover the tumultuous events following the assassination of Julius Caesar. An edition of the Cicero–Brutus correspondence had been brought out by Conyers Middleton (1683–1750), religious controversialist and biographer of Cicero, in 1743, and had appeared more recently in a posthumous edition of Middleton’s Miscellaneous Works (2nd edn, 5 vols.) in 1755.
12. lusus: Latin, lusus (naturae), ‘a sport, a freak of nature, something abnormal or monstrous’.
13. the Public Advertizer: The reviews of Letters E–B in the Public Advertiser.
14. the black Pudding: Erskine, apropos Boswell’s very dark hair and complexion and his stocky build, wrote in his letter of 1 May 1762, ‘Believe me, I have sometimes taken you at a distance, for the pillar of smoke which used to accompany the Israelites out of Egypt; it would be impossible to tell how many things I have taken you for at different times; sometimes I have taken you for the witches cauldron in Macbeth; this resemblance was in some degree warranted by your figure and shape; sometimes for an enormous inkbottle; sometimes for a funeral procession; now and then for a chimney sweeper, and not unfrequently for a black pudding’ (Letter xxvi; General Correspondence, 1757–1763, p. 230).
15. Lady Margt: Lady Margaret Macdonald.
16. Stuff: Perhaps, rubbish, worthless writing, nonsense. But the ‘History’ breaks off abruptly here, and is left incomplete.
Boswell’s Edinburgh friend and mentor Sir David Dalrymple wrote in a letter of 21 April 1763, ‘I was a little surprized when I saw your name in the news Papers[;] when I see your work I shall either give you my opinion or withhold it. I believe it is just as well for me to give you my opinion before I read your part of the work as afterwards: I say your part of the work, for I have not the pleasure of knowing your correspondent. In Mr Boswell’s letters [i.e. not Letters E–B but the letters Boswell has been writing to Sir David from London] there is much good humoured levity, some wit and some attempts at wit, a moderate degree of egotism and of that which can be expressed in no language but English, Oddity.’ He added that ‘It is a notion of mine, that any man of any genius or literature must sooner or later publish some of his compositions, and the sooner it is over one’s head the better ’ (Yale C 1419).
Boswell himself, after returning to London from his European travels and retrieving the books and papers left in the Temple (see 25 June, n.1), recorded in his journal for 17 February 1766, ‘Read Erskine’s and Boswell’s Letters; could not bear your own except one or two. In general mere forced extravagance and no real humour. Erskine’s will please still, though not so greatly as once’ (Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France, 1765–1766, ed. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955, p. 288; London: Heinemann, 1955, p. 304).