Shakespeare references are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).
1. Know thyself: The usual translation of ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ, one of the maxims of the ancient Seven Sages, though attributed at different times to various ancient thinkers and authorities, and inscribed (according to the second-century-ad travel writer Pausanius) on the portico of the temple of Apollo at Delphi. This exhortation became a key concept in the philosophy of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle. Samuel Johnson’s Rambler essay no. 24 (9 June 1750) had begun, ‘Among the precepts, or aphorisms, admitted by general consent, and inculcated by frequent repetition, there is none more famous among the masters of antient wisdom, than that compendious lesson, Γνωθι σεαυτσν, “Be acquainted with thyself”.’ Boswell would return to the same thought nearly twenty years later in one of his essays for the London Magazine as ‘The Hypochondriack’ (Essay LXVI, Mar. 1783; Hypochondriack, vol. 2, p. 257), on diary-keeping: ‘The ancient precept “ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ – Know thyself,” which by some is ascribed to Pythagoras, and by others is so venerated as to be supposed one of the sacred responses of the oracle at Delphos, cannot be so perfectly obeyed without the assistance of a register of one’s life.’
2. what manner of person he is: ‘For if any be a hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural face in a glass: For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way, and straightway forgetteth what manner of man he was’ (James 1:23–4).
3. Erskine: One of Boswell’s Scottish companions, the Hon. Andrew Erskine (1740–93), a younger brother of the musical composer Thomas Erskine (1732–81), 6th Earl of Kellie. He was the fifth of the six children of Alexander Erskine (d. 1756), 5th Earl of Kellie, and his second wife, Janet Pitcairne (1699–1775). The earldom was impoverished, and the family fortunes in general decline. Erskine was a lieutenant (though a generally inactive one) in the 71st Regiment of Foot, and a poet. He will soon, to Boswell’s initially dismayed surprise, arrive in London in company with two of his three sisters, and they will figure frequently in the journal.
4. discover: Reveal, disclose.
5. my: A minor slip; the sentence calls for ‘his’.
6. the Spleen: Moroseness, depression, ill-temper, of which the organ of this name was, in early medicine and psychology, thought to be the seat.
7. my worthy friend Johnstone: Boswell’s closest Edinburgh friend, John Johnston (?1729–86) of Grange, whom he met (probably in 1755–6) when they were students at the University of Edinburgh. He was a legal writer (the Scots term roughly equivalent to an English solicitor) in Edinburgh, and owner of three farms in Dumfriesshire, to the south of Edinburgh: Grange (the largest), Upperbanks and Heithat – and is thus styled ‘Johnston of Grange’. Boswell decides soon to send his journal by post to Johnston in instalments, with accompanying letters (now published in Corr. 1) often featuring elaborate instructions for reading it and for its safekeeping.
1. I called … adieu: Johnston’s Edinburgh lodging at this time was in Don’s Close, a short walk away from the Boswells’ Edinburgh home in Blair’s Land (on the east side of Parliament Close, now Parliament Square), one of the tall residential buildings in Edinburgh’s steep Old Town. Boswell had written to Johnston on 27 October, ‘I beg that you may be in town by the 10th of Novr.’ (Corr. 1, p. 19), hoping that he would come join him in the ritual farewell salute to their city described later in this journal entry, and invest the moment of departure with the significance Boswell himself attached to it. He had hopes that Erskine too would come to see him off, and that Johnston might in fact accompany him on the first stage of his journey, as far as Berwick. He remained pained that Johnston failed to come see him off. He wrote to Johnston from Durham on his journey south the next day (16 November), reproving him ‘for neglecting to come to town’, and then again after his arrival in London: ‘Indeed my friend it hurt me; that we did not meet and bid a cordial adieu’ (20 Nov., Corr. 1, p. 23).
2. Cairnie: John Cairnie MD (d. 1791), Edinburgh physician, who had been active in Jacobite affairs, and had spent many years travelling on the Continent. (Jacobitism, from ‘Jacobus’, the vulgate Latin rendering of ‘James’, was the term used for continuing loyalty to or sympathy for the cause of the descendants of King James II (1633–1701), deposed in 1688. His grandson, Charles Edward Stuart (‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, the Young Pretender), had led a second Jacobite uprising in 1745 in an attempt to reclaim the British throne, but his forces were defeated at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, and he escaped to France; see the journal for 17 January 1763, and nn. 1–4.) Cairnie and Boswell were fellow Freemasons, members of the same Lodge in Edinburgh, the Canongate Kilwinning (St John’s). Boswell, before departure, had arranged with Cairnie to attend to the needs of his pregnant lover, Peggy Doig (see n. 4 for 2 December and the journal entry for 28 July and n. 3), soon to give birth to their child.
3. my Father and Mother: Alexander Boswell (1707–82), Scottish judge, and 8th Laird of the Auchinleck estate in Ayrshire, with the judicial title of Lord Auchinleck after his appointment as one of the judges of the Scottish Court of Session (1754) and the High Court of Justiciary (1755), and his first wife, Euphemia (Erskine) Boswell (1718–66), Lady Auchinleck. Though of course he could not have known it, Boswell would never see his mother again (she died in 1766, while Boswell was in France).
4. my Brother Davie … be happy: David Boswell (1748–1826), younger of Boswell’s two surviving brothers, was at this time 14 years old, and soon (March 1763) to be apprenticed to the Edinburgh banking firm of John Coutts & Co. He would leave in 1767 for Valencia to work with the trading firm Honorius Dalliot & Co. While there, having been warned of a possible Spanish Catholic prejudice against Old Testament names, he took the name ‘Thomas’ before David. Boswell’s hopes for his brother were to some extent fulfilled. T. D. Boswell returned from Spain to London in 1780, and married Anne Catherine Green in 1783, but his business activities would not prove particularly successful. In 1791, through the influence of the powerful Scottish politician Henry Dundas (1742–1811) – fulfilling an undertaking he had given Lord Auchinleck, and after being pressed on the matter by Boswell – he secured a post in the Navy Pay Office. After working diligently and living frugally, he purchased Crawley Grange (a sixteenth-century manor in Buckinghamshire) and other properties.
5. the cross … our noble Boswell: the cross: The term still in Boswell’s time in use for the site near St Giles’ Cathedral at the junction of the High Street (seen n. 6 below) and the Lawnmarket, where the City Cross (also called the Mercat Cross) had stood until its demolition (despite violent public protest) in 1756. It had formerly been the place from which royal, religious and legal proclamations were announced, and the site remained a popular and busy social gathering point. Cadies: Caddies – errand-boys, odd-job men and the like, who for a small payment (usually a penny) would undertake various tasks, carry messages, hold horses, guide strangers, sell pamphlets, and so on. They had their headquarters in Edinburgh at The Cross, where they waited on the lookout for chance employment. The name survives now in the context of one of their many original employments, as golfers’ attendants. Chairmen: Men employed to carry passengers in sedan chairs; like caddies, a familiar feature of the daily urban bustle of Edinburgh, whose many steep streets and narrow side-streets (‘closes’ and ‘wynds’) made passage for horse-drawn vehicles difficult. God prosper long our noble Boswell: Boswell playfully adapts the opening line – ‘God prosper long our noble King’ – of The Ballad of Chevy Chase, a popular ‘broadside’ version of an old ballad, The Hunting of the Cheviot, which, based loosely on the events of the Battle of Otterburn (fought in 1388), told of the famous military clash between the Scottish James Douglas (d. 1388), 2nd Earl of Douglas, and the English Sir Henry Percy (‘Hotspur’) (1364–1403). Joseph Addison (1672–1719) had discussed Chevy Chase in two of his Spectator essays, nos. 70 and 74 (21 and 25 May 1711). The Spectator essays, by Addison and Richard (later Sir Richard) Steele (1672–1729), with some contributions from Eustace Budgell (1686–1737), John Hughes (1677–1720) and others, were among Boswell’s favourite reading, and helped fire his boyhood enthusiasm for and shape his ideas about London.
6. the high-street: The High Street, a section of Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, winding steeply downhill and eastward from Edinburgh Castle to Holyrood House, where it is called the Canongate.
7. a Mr. Stewart … the year 1746: Alexander Stewart (d. 1769), in the East India Company’s service, was the eldest surviving son of ardently Jacobite parents, Charles Stewart (d. 1757) of Ardshiel, in Appin, and Isabel (Haldane) Stewart (1713–82) of the family of Haldane of Lanrick. Charles Stewart had corresponded with Prince Charles Edward before the 1745 uprising, fought in the battles at Prestonpans, Clifton and Falkirk, and led the Appin Highlanders when they and the other Jacobite forces were defeated in the battle at Culloden in 1746. He eluded government pursuit afterwards and escaped to France, where he died, at Sens. His estate, as Boswell notes, was, like those of many who fought in Charles Edward’s cause, forfeited. Alexander Stewart was later styled ‘Lord Appin’ in the Jacobite peerage, succeeding his cousin Dugald Stewart of Appin in 1769. His brother, Duncan Stewart (d. 1793), emigrated to America, was appointed collector of customs in Connecticut, later settled in Bermuda, then returned to Scotland and eventually secured restoration of the Ardshiel estate in 1782.
8. east indies … first Mate: The East Indies comprised what is now India, but included in their widest sense also the islands in the Indian Ocean extending to the Malay archipelago, and the nations later referred to as the ‘Far East’. (In a conversation Boswell records in the Life of Johnson for 8 May 1778, Johnson and he include Chinese people as ‘East-Indians’ (Life, p. 707).) The East India Company (EIC), set up at the beginning of the seventeenth century to challenge the trade of the Dutch East India Company, was now, though administratively disorganized, rising to immense mercantile, naval, military and political power on the subcontinent, especially following the victory for EIC forces under Robert Clive (1725–74) in the Battle of Plassey, 1757. Stewart was about to go out first mate on the EIC vessel Pigot, whose captain’s logbook for the voyage runs from 3 February 1763 to 17 November 1764. It sailed on 18 February. He had earlier gone as purser (October 1749 to August 1751), fifth mate (May 1757 to April 1759), and third mate (January 1760 to May 1762) on the Prince Edward. He later went out first mate on the Duke of Albany (1765–6), and was captain of that vessel in 1768–9, his final voyage.
9. Abbey of Holyroodhouse … old Chapel: The palace of Holyroodhouse, east of Edinburgh, outside its ancient city wall, had been the scene of much of Scotland’s royal life and history, but had fallen into disuse in Boswell’s time, especially following the 1745 uprising (and had not been occupied by royalty since 1682). Boswell was fond of it and of the nearby abbey, which was a ruin. His first published poem, ‘An Evening-Walk in the Abbey-church of Holyroodhouse’, written when he was seventeen, lamented that it had become a ‘sacrifice to desolating time’ (l. 12). The crown of Scotland was engraved in the stonework of the cupola for a clock, above the doorway at the front of the palace.
10. Arthur-Seat: Arthur’s Seat, in Holyrood Park, part of the spectacular remnant of the ancient Edinburgh volcano system rising at its highest point to about 820 ft above Edinburgh. Associations with King Arthur of Camelot have been claimed but disputed (some attributing the name to a local hero also called Arthur). Boswell reports his warm fondness for this landmark again in a playfully extravagant apostrophe in his entry for 6 July 1763.
11. our Journey: From the places named subsequently it can be seen that the chaise follows the 402 miles of the ‘East Road’ (a ‘West Road’, shorter by 100 miles, ran to London through Carlisle, Wigan and Coventry). It is essentially the route of the modern A1, following for much of its length the ancient Great North Road. The distances mentioned in the notes hereafter are taken from the list of stages between Edinburgh and London in the Universal Scots Almanack for 1763.
12. shaving: Slang term among Boswell and some of his youthful Edinburgh companions, members of a group they called the Soaping Club, whose motto was ‘Let every man soap his own beard’ (meaning, according to Boswell, let each indulge his own humour). The term broadly meant teasing or quietly nettling people, leading them into making themselves look ridiculous.
13. Old Cambus: Aldcambus, near the Berwickshire coast, 38 miles east of Edinburgh.
14. Berwick: Berwick-upon-Tweed, busy port and market centre for an extensive hinterland on both sides of the river Tweed (the Scotland–England border), 16 miles from Aldcambus, 54 miles from Edinburgh.
15. Aytoun: Ayton, village near the left bank of the Eye Water, about 7 miles north-west of Berwick.
16. negoes: Negus, a popular warm mildly alcoholic beverage, involving wine (usually port or sherry) mixed with hot water, and sweetened and flavoured, said to have been invented by and named after Colonel Francis Negus (1670–1732) of the 25th (‘Suffolk’) Regiment of Foot, MP for Ipswich 1717–32.
1. Alnwick: In Northumberland, 84 miles from Edinburgh, 30 miles south of Berwick, some 33 miles north of Newcastle upon Tyne. Nearby Alnwick Castle was the seat of the earls and dukes of Northumberland.
2. Captain Elliot: Perhaps William Elliott (d. 1783), at this time a cadet in the East India Company’s service.
3. the Peace: The most heated and controversial topic of political conversation of the day. The preliminaries of the Treaty of Paris, after protracted negotiations, had been signed thirteen days earlier, ending the Seven Years War in Europe and the last of the French and Indian Wars in colonial North America. The treaty itself was to be signed on 10 February 1763. The lengthy, costly conflict led after initial setbacks to great British successes against France (and latterly Spain), and made Britain the globe’s dominant trading and imperial power.
4. Durham: About 15 miles south of Newcastle, and about 270 miles north of London.
1. Doncaster: In south Yorkshire, about 156 miles north of London.
1. shot … hand: The captains’ logbooks of Stewart’s earlier voyages (now in the British Library) do not record such an incident, which probably would have occurred while the EIC ship’s longboat was ashore, with its crew loading cargo or acquiring provisions.
2. Stamford & Stilton: Stamford (73 miles from Doncaster), in Lincolnshire, and Stilton, a village now in Cambridgeshire (then a distribution centre for the famous cheese of the name), were 14 miles apart by the coach road.
3. our two last stages … Biggleswade: Stilton to Buckden (14 miles), and then Buckden to Biggleswade (14 miles). Thereafter the chaise would have passed through Stevenage, Hatfield and Barnet.
1. Highgate hill: About 5 miles north of Boswell’s eventual destination in central London, affording fine views of the city and surrounding countryside. Stewart and Boswell had made the journey from Edinburgh to London in good time – about four and a half days. Mid-century road improvements, including extensive turnpiking (following the 1741 Highway Act), had shortened a journey which in 1754 had been advertised by one Edinburgh coachman as taking 10 days in summer and 12 days in winter.
2. Cato’s Soliloquy … Soul: From Addison’s tragedy Cato, first produced in 1713, and very popular in the eighteenth century:
It must be so – Plato, thou reasonest well! –
Else whence this pleasing Hope, this fond Desire,
This longing after Immortality?
Or whence this secret Dread, and inward Horror,
Of falling into Nought? Why shrinks the Soul
Back on her self, and startles at Destruction?
’Tis the Divinity that stir’s within us;
’Tis Heav’n its self, that points out an Hereafter,
And intimates Eternity to Man … (V.i)
3. the burthen … tit for tat: ‘Tit for Tat’ was a song of the time, to which Boswell (who had a good singing voice) is perhaps here improvising some new words. The ‘burthen’ (burden) is the refrain, or repeated chorus.
4. Digges … London: West Digges (?1725/6–86), actor, at this time leading man of the Edinburgh theatre in the Canongate, which Boswell (rebelling against the strict codes of his parents) had been delightedly frequenting, and where he had known James Love (see 21 November, n. 15), Mrs Love, Digges and other actors. (Boswell means here that before leaving Edinburgh he had got his list of inns from Digges, who had lived for part of the 1750s in London.) Digges’s acting in several roles, among them the highwayman-hero Macheath in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), had dazzled the young Boswell. In 1778, he would write that Digges ‘was the first actor that I ever saw; and the impression made upon a warm youthfull imagination is strong and permanent. It was He who threw open to me the portals of Theatrical Enchantment, and therefore He and Pleasure are inseparably associated in my mind’ (to David Garrick, 3 Mar. 1778; The Correspondence of James Boswell with David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Edmond Malone, ed. Peter S. Baker et al. (London: Heinemann; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1986), p. 77). He had seen Digges play Macheath as recently as 10 November (when, he noted in his journal for that date, ‘Digges played Macheath as well as ever’ (Jaunt, pp. 109–10)). Digges remained for him an appealing model of elegant masculine social bearing.
5. Mr. Hayward’s … fleetstreet: John Hayward (d. 1764), innkeeper of the Black Lion inn, Water Lane, Fleet Street.
6. first came to London: Boswell had fled to London in March 1760 from the University of Glasgow, to which Lord Auchinleck, displeased with his life in Edinburgh, had sent him. He spent three exhilarating months in the metropolis before being brought back to Edinburgh by his father, and had spent the time since then wrangling for permission to return.
7. east india Company: Its administrative headquarters, East India House, were in Leadenhall Street.
8. keep up the acquaintance: No record survives of their having done so.
9. my friend Douglasse’s … wit: Andrew Douglas (d. 1806), surgeon, residing in Pall Mall; later (according to William Munk’s Roll of the Royal College of Physicians of London, 2nd edn, 1878) a physician and man-midwife. Mary (Carter) Douglas (1730–90), his first wife (nicknamed Polly), from Deal, in Kent, was a younger half-sister of the author and translator Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806). Boswell had met Douglas during his first London escapade in 1760.
10. Covent Garden: One of London’s two royal-patent theatres (the other being Drury Lane).
11. Every Man in his Humour: Comedy by Ben Jonson (1572/3–1637), his first major play, first performed in 1598 (with Shakespeare apparently in the cast), printed in 1601, and revised by Jonson for the folio edition of 1616 with the original setting changed from Florence to London and the characters given English names. Revived now at Covent Garden, it played first on 25 October. In a letter to Andrew Erskine written the next day, Boswell reveals that he had at first wanted to go to Drury Lane to see the great David Garrick (for whom see 22 November, n. 1) in King Lear (its first performance this season), but was too late to get in.
12. Woodward … finely: Henry Woodward (1714–77), a leading comic actor of the time. Captain Bobadil (the cowardly braggart soldier of Jonson’s play) was his most celebrated role.
1. hackney-coach: ‘A four-wheeled coach, drawn by two horses, and seated for six persons, kept for hire’ (OED).
2. great œconomy: Lord Auchinleck had agreed to let Boswell have an annual allowance of £200, which was in fact a considerable sum (and more than some annual household incomes). But the journal entries and memoranda will show Boswell struggling to live economically in London, as a well-born and fashionable young Scot on his travels, on a tight budget. (For his projected budgetary calculations, see Appendix I.)
3. Collection of wild beasts: Probably a menagerie of animals at an inn or tavern.
4. dined: Dinner at this time was not the evening meal it later became, but taken usually at 2 or 3 p.m.
5. wrote letters: Among them, the one to Erskine mentioned in n. 11 for 19 November, and the one to Johnston quoted above (15 November, n. 1), in which he also wrote, ‘I am all in a flutter of joy. I am full of fine wild romantic feeling to find myself realy in LONDON … I shall keep a journal of every day; and send it to you weekly so as to come on Saturday night and comfort you on Sunday’ (Corr. 1, pp. 23–4).
1. my Commission: That is, an ensigncy in one of the regiments of Guards, which Boswell had come to London, with his father’s reluctant consent, to try to seek through the influence of patrons. Purchase of such a commission was the more usual procedure, from which the regiments’ proprietary colonels made profits. Lord Auchinleck, who thought the plan improbable, and the army life unworthy of the son and heir he expected to follow him in a career in Scots law, had declined to purchase one for him.
2. May-fair Chapel: In Curzon Street. Chapels are places of worship subordinate to or dependent on the church of a parish.
3. much so in youth … steady flame: Boswell (as will be seen in several later entries) had painful memories of his Calvinist religious upbringing – mostly at the hands of his intensely pious mother – and of the Scottish Kirk’s forms of worship, and its doctrine of election and damnation and emphasis on the terrors of hellfire. He had experimented in a troubled adolescence with various conversions, and had in 1760 in London received the Roman Catholic Communion. As here (the first Sunday of this trip, in an Anglican house of worship), he continued to be attracted to Anglican worship, to which his English friend William Johnson Temple (to appear later in this journal) had introduced him in Edinburgh.
4. George Lewis Scott: Scott (1708–80), barrister and mathematician, was at one time tutor to the royal princes (including the future George III), and from 1758 a Commissioner of Excise. He was a long-standing friend of Lord Auchinleck. His home was in Leicester Fields.
5. Laird of Macfarlane: Walter Macfarlane (?1698/?1705–1767), 20th Laird of Macfarlane, eminent Scottish antiquarian and genealogist (whose extensive collections were acquired in 1785 by the Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh, and some of them published by the Scottish Historical Society in five volumes, 1900– 1906). Another old friend of Lord Auchinleck, he had been one of the witnesses at Boswell’s baptism. He too was residing in Leicester Fields. His much younger wife, Lady Elizabeth (‘Betty’), soon to appear in the journal, was a sister of Andrew Erskine.
6. the Union: The Acts of Union of 1707 in the English and Scottish parliaments, following the Treaty of Union of 1706, formed Scotland and England, which had been separate nations (although sharing a monarch for most of the seventeenth century), into the United Kingdom of Great Britain, ruled from Westminster. Though the Union had the support of the major political parties, it was unpopular among much of the Scottish populace, and long remained controversial.
7. Doctor Pringle: John (from 1766, Sir John) Pringle (1707–82), eminent Scottish-born physician. He had practised in Edinburgh before a career in military medicine, had been physician general to the army, became a pioneering reformer of military medicine and sanitation, wrote Observations on the Diseases of the Army (1752, with many editions thereafter), and is often referred to as the founder of modern military medicine. He had settled into private medical practice in London in 1749. He later became physician to the Queen, and was president of the Royal Society 1772–8. Another old Boswell family friend, and another of the witnesses at Boswell’s baptism. Lord Auchinleck described him in a letter of 18 June 1763 as ‘the most sincere friend I ever had and the person to whom I owe most obligations’ (Yale C 215).
8. Mr. Murdoch … Thomson: The Rev. Patrick Murdoch (d. 1774), later DD, Scottish-born Church of England clergyman (from 1760 vicar of Great Thurlow), author of papers in science and geography, friend, editor and biographer of the Scots-born dramatist and poet James Thomson (1700–1748). His ‘An Account of the Life and Writings of Mr. James Thomson’ was prefixed to the handsome two-volume quarto memorial edition he prepared of Thomson’s Works, which had appeared this year. Subscriptions to this edition financed the erection of Thomson’s monument in Westminster Abbey, which opened to public display on 10 May. Boswell was among the subscribers, his name appearing as ‘James Boswell, Esq; jun. of Auchinleck’ in the ‘List of Encouragers’.
9. Mr. Seymours … Governour: Robert Symmer (?1705/1707–63), who had been tutor (‘Governour’) to the young Francis Greville, Lord Brooke (1719–73), later 1st Earl of Warwick, during his travels in Europe. Like Scott and Murdoch, he was a friend of James Thomson, whom he had known from the time of their student days at Edinburgh College. He had been head clerk of the office of the Treasurer of the Chamber (which paid the bills of the King’s household), and on losing the position at the change of ministries in 1757, he declined an offer of the governorship of New Jersey. In 1759 he published a paper in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions on experiments and observations on static electricity (an episode often referred to in histories of electrical experiments as ‘Symmer’s Socks’). He was in failing health at this time, and died in June 1763.
10. The Peace. Lord Bute: In the rancorous popular as well as political debates about the Peace, opponents of the unpopular Scots-born Prime Minister, John Stuart (1713–92), 3rd Earl of Bute, were accusing him of having made unnecessary concessions to France in the terms of the peace treaties.
11. Miss Sally Forrester: Boswell’s first sexual partner, to whom he lost his virginity during his first London escapade in 1760.
12. the blue Periwig: The building stood, as Boswell notes, in Southampton Street, near the Strand. A name of this kind usually indicated the premises of a maker of these artificial caps of hair.
13. broke & dead: That is, the proprietors of the Blue Periwig had gone bankrupt and died.
14. Miss Jeany Wells … Soho: Wells was another of the women with whom Boswell consorted in 1760. (‘Barrack Street’ is Berwick Street, in Soho.) For her he wrote a four-stanza ‘Ode Written at Newmarket’, each stanza of which ends with the line, ‘How much I love the charming WELLS!’
15. Love … Mrs. Love & Billy: Love: James Love was the stage name of James Dance (1722–74), actor, dramatist (chiefly of pantomime pieces) and theatre manager, older brother of the artist and politician Nathaniel Dance (later Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland, or Holland) (1735–1811) and of the architect George Dance the younger (1741–1825). It was at Love’s suggestion in 1758 that Boswell first began to keep a journal, and in a letter to Temple of 16 December 1758 Boswell described him as his ‘second best friend’ (Corr. 6, p. 15). He and his wife had acted in Edinburgh after earlier stints in Dublin and elsewhere, and he had been manager of the Canongate theatre from 1759, before being taken on this season by Garrick at Drury Lane. Mrs. Love: Mrs Love’s identity remains difficult to establish. James Dance married Elizabeth Hooper or Hope (d. 1783) in 1739, and she too acted, using the name Mrs Love. They had two children, but evidently Dance left her and took up with another woman, whose name may have been Catherine L’Amour or de L’Amour. She too acted in Edinburgh using the name Mrs Love, and died in 1807. According to F. A. Pottle’s deductions (Earlier Years, pp. 77, 93, 98, 173, 477), Boswell and Mrs Love had a clandestine affair in Edinburgh, and he will seek to renew sexual relations with her here in London (though Pottle is mistaken in thinking that ‘Mrs Love’ is Love’s first wife). Boswell mentions seeing her in his journal for 26 October, when he had just returned to Edinburgh from a tour of the border counties, and called on her ‘and little Billy her son’ at her home, where she (‘a smart, clever, good-humoured creature, and a very lively actress’) showed him some of Love’s letters to her from London (Jaunt, p. 94). She herself then was ‘to set out’ (for London) ‘in a week or two’ and join her husband at Drury Lane. Billy: William Dance (1755–1840) was at this time 7 years old. He became an accomplished musical performer, and a founder and director of the Royal Philharmonic Society.
16. a Pantomime called the Witches of his: Love’s The Witches: or Harlequin Cherokee, one of five new afterpieces produced by Garrick at Drury Lane in this season, playing first on 23 November (two days after this journal entry). Harlequin was a regularly recurring figure at this time in stage pantomime pieces. Love’s pantomime was probably inspired by the arrival in London on 21 June this year of a delegation of three Cherokee men, who had attracted much public notice.
1. Garrick: David Garrick (1717–79), actor, playwright and the manager of Drury Lane, the dominant theatre figure of the time. Boswell had met him during his first London escapade of 1760.
2. Scrub … Bonniface: Scrub (played by Garrick) and Boniface (played by Love) are characters in The Beaux’ Stratagem (first produced 1707) by George Farquhar (1676/7–1707). The play had opened for this season, under the title The Stratagem, on 13 October (with Garrick in the part of Archer). The Farmer’s Return from London, a short farce, was written by Garrick himself. An evening’s entertainment at London’s two royal-patent theatres at this time followed a standard format of seven elements: music (three pieces before the rise of the curtain); a prologue; the mainpiece (a tragedy, comedy or ballad opera); an entr’acte of singing and dancing; an epilogue; an afterpiece (a farce, pantomime, or procession); and final music.
1. the City: London east of Temple Bar, the term referring to London’s centre of business, finance, trade, insurance and banking.
2. George Home … Son: Home (1743–1819) was the son of Henry Home (1696–1782), Lord Kames, author, one of Lord Auchinleck’s fellow judges in the Scottish Court of Session, and his wife, Agatha Drummond (1711–95), heiress of the Blair Drummond estate in Perthshire. (He later took the name Home-Drummond on succeeding to his mother’s estate.) He had just studied at the University of St Andrews, and was now in the City to pursue business as a merchant. Boswell had met him several times recently at his parents’ home, as recorded in his ‘Harvest Jaunt’ journal of 1762.
3. Lord Eglintoune … neglectfully: Alexander Montgomerie (1723–69), 10th Earl of Eglinton, in Ayrshire, a Scots representative peer, one of George III’s lords of the bedchamber, and a colleague and supporter of Bute. He had been Boswell’s guide to the high-born pleasures of London during the first escapade in 1760, for which he would retain Boswell’s lifelong affection and gratitude. He lived in Queen Street, Mayfair, where he had taken Boswell into residence in 1760. Boswell’s reasons for feeling that he is being neglected now by Eglinton become clearer later in the journal.
4. Millne the Architect: Robert Mylne (1734–1811), Scottish engineer and architect, at this time at work in the building of the Blackfriars Bridge (which when first opened was named Pitt Bridge) across the Thames. His design, with its elliptical arches, had been accepted in 1760. (The design provoked much public debate, and Samuel Johnson wrote three letters to the Daily Gazeteer in December 1759 opposing this design and supporting the circular arches proposed by John Gwynn.) The first pile had been driven in June 1760, and the bridge would open to general traffic in November 1769. In September of that year, Boswell and his friend George Dempster ‘went and took a survey of Blackfriars Bridge, and were agreeably struck with its grandeur and beauty’ (2 Sept. 1769; Wife: McGraw-Hill, pp. 271–2; Heinemann, p. 289).
5. retenue: Boswell’s French word (which he spells in various ways and sometimes with an acute accent on the final ‘e’) for self-disciplined or self-restrained – something he often (chiefly in his private daily memoranda) urges himself to become.
1. Dodsley … pay me down: James Dodsley (1724–97), bookseller (i.e. publisher), younger brother of Robert Dodsley (1703–64), whom he had succeeded in the prosperous and influential publishing firm R. and J. Dodsley, in 1759. Boswell’s poem The Cub at Newmarket: a Tale, recounting a ‘whimsical adventure’ he had when taken by Lord Eglinton to a spring meeting at this racecourse in 1760, appeared in March of this year. Boswell had guaranteed costs himself when faced with Dodsley’s initial reluctance to publish, hence his keen pleasure here in the sales and his profits.
2. address: Social self-comportment, mode of self-presentation.
1. the house of Lords: The Upper House of the bicameral British parliament. It met at this time in the White Chamber in the Palace of Westminster; the Lower House – the House of Commons – met in St Stephen’s Chapel. Most buildings in the complex of the Palace of Westminster were destroyed in a fire in 1834. The later parliament buildings by Sir Charles Barry (1795–1860) and Augustus Pugin (1815–52) were built 1837–47.
2. the King make his Speech: The young George III (1738–1820), whose coronation had taken place on 22 September of the previous year, opened this session of Parliament with a short speech on the ‘bloody and expensive’ war, and the peace negotiations.
3. to be acquainted with him: Boswell would meet George III first in 1766, after his return from his European travels, when Eglinton had him presented at court. He would have several later meetings and conversations, and develop a high veneration for him.
4. my health … to me: Boswell had suffered severely from two bouts of gonorrhoea: one contracted during his 1760 London visit, and a second after he visited ‘a house of recreation’ in Edinburgh in the summer of the same year (Corr. 6, p. 33).
5. a Girl: A guarded reference (to conceal her identity from his journal’s reader, Johnston of Grange) to Mrs Love.
6. come up: From Edinburgh, to London.
7. a girl: That is, a prostitute, a streetwalker.
8. in armour: Wearing a prophylactic sheath (for which ‘armour’ was a euphemistic or slang term), an early version of a condom. Such sheaths in the mid-eighteenth century were made of animal membrane, reusable, tied at the open end with a ribbon, and had to be moistened before use. Their purpose was usually seen not as contraceptive, but as protection for men against venereal disease.
9. John Ross Mckye: John Ross Mackye (1707–97), Scottish MP, at this time for Kirkcudbright Stewartry. A friend and close political associate of Bute and of the Duke of Queensberry (for whom see n. 11 below). In April he will be appointed Paymaster of the Ordnance.
10. General Douglas: Lieutenant General Archibald Douglas (1707–78), colonel of the 13th Dragoons, who had had a distinguished military career, including service in the notable battles of Dettingen and Minden in the War of the Austrian Succession, and was at this time MP for Dumfriesshire. In September he had been recommended to Boswell as one who might help in his pursuit of a commission in the Guards. He and his family had close connections with the Duke of Queensberry, by whom he was politically directed.
11. Duke of Queensberry … Commission: Charles Douglas (1698– 1778), 3rd Duke of Queensberry, privy counsellor, Keeper of the Great Seal of Scotland, a close friend of Bute and a confidant of the King. Lord Auchinleck, though he disliked Boswell’s army plan, had in response to Boswell’s urgings written to Queensberry on 12 May of this year asking him to help secure Boswell an ensigncy in the Guards. Queensberry wrote back on 24 May, undertaking to use his ‘best endeavours’, but warning that officers’ commissions in the Guards (the elite regiments of royal household troops, first in order of military precedence) were not ‘so easily obtain’d as in marching Regiments’ (i.e. regular infantry) (Corr. 9, p. 255).
1. Lord Adam Gordon: Gordon (c.1726–1801), military officer and MP for Aberdeenshire, fourth surviving son of Alexander Gordon (c.1678–1728), 2nd Duke of Gordon, and Lady Henrietta Mordaunt (1681/2–1760), had been a lieutenant colonel in the 3rd Foot Guards since 1756. He would become colonel of the 66th Foot in January 1763, before further military promotions. Also attached politically to Bute.
2. Mr. Terrie … no children: Thomas Terrie, chamberkeeper (or office-keeper) at the Office of Trade and Plantations in Whitehall, a short distance from these lodgings in Downing Street, Westminster. He was appointed in 1758, and would be dismissed (for an ‘improper transaction’) in February 1767. The shire of Murray is Morayshire, in north-eastern Scotland, later called Elginshire. Mrs Terrie (who, Boswell reports later, was from Norwich) is not certainly identified.
3. the Parade: A large open gravelled space before the Horse Guards, where the royal household troops paraded almost daily.
4. Mr. Cochrane: William Cochrane, of Gullane (or Gullen), partner in the now-forming Herries, Cochrane & Co., in Jeffrey’s Square, St Mary Axe, the London branch of the Edinburgh banking firm John Coutts & Co.
5. Lord Elibank: Patrick Murray (1702/3–78), 5th Baron Elibank, Scottish advocate, author and economist, and formerly lieutenant colonel in the Marines, who had led Wynyards Marines at Cartagena in 1741, following which he left the service. His wife, Margaretta Maria (de Yong), the Dowager Lady North and Grey, had died in June of this year. He was now pursuing his legal and literary interests.
6. Sir James Macdonald: Sir James Macdonald (d. 1766), 8th Baronet of Sleat, at Armadale on the Isle of Skye, at this time studying at Christ Church, Oxford. His mother (who will appear later in the journal) was Eglinton’s sister. He was widely admired for his learning while a scholar at Eton, and now at Oxford.
7. Sir Simeon Stuart: Sir Simeon Stuart (1720–79), 3rd Baronet, of Hartley Mauditt, an English MP (for Hampshire from 1761), and Chamberlain of the Exchequer. Also a Bute supporter.
1. Donaldson: Alexander Donaldson (d. 1794), Edinburgh bookseller, who had already published poetry by Erskine and Boswell, and whom Boswell hopes will market his The Cub at Newmarket in Edinburgh. At this period he was in the midst of a controversial and eventually successful bid to challenge English copyright laws, and issue books in inexpensive reprints.
2. Child’s Coffeehouse: In St Paul’s Churchyard. One of London’s older coffee houses, it dated from the last years of the seventeenth century, and was at this time nearing its end.
3. the Inner Temple … friend Temple: William Johnson Temple (1739–96), later a clergyman and essayist, was from Berwick-upon-Tweed, and first introduced Boswell to the Anglican form of worship in Edinburgh, where they were college friends in 1755. He had recently taken lodgings in Farrar’s Building in Inner Temple Lane, which ran by the Inner Temple, one of London’s four Inns of Court (legal residences and training institutions, the others being Middle Temple, Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn). He and Boswell had not seen each other since meeting briefly in Cambridge in May 1760, while Boswell was being brought home to Scotland by his father after his first London escapade, and the correspondence between them had lapsed. Temple was admitted to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1758, intending to prepare for the Bar, and was admitted to the Middle Temple in 1759, but left in 1761. He would be readmitted to Trinity Hall in June 1763, intending a career in the Church. In 1766 he was ordained in the Church of England and appointed rector of Mamhead, Devon, becoming vicar of St Gluvias, Cornwall, in 1776. He and Boswell remained close friends, and kept up a lifelong correspondence.
4. out of town: Temple may have been ‘at Berwick, where his father’s financial situation was becoming increasingly embarrassing’ (Corr. 6, p. 34).
5. Bedford Coffee-house: Next door, south, to the Shakespeare’s Head tavern, near the entrance to the Covent Garden playhouse, much frequented by actors and other theatre people.
6. the famous Mr. Beard: John Beard (?1716/19–91), actor, vocalist and theatre manager, a leading singer of his time (for whom George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) composed some of his greatest tenor parts). He had succeeded as manager of Covent Garden theatre in 1761.
7. the Beefsteak Club: The Beef-Steak Club (or Society), originally a club of twenty-four men founded in 1735 by Beard’s father-in-law, John Rich (1692–1761), manager of Covent Garden, and George Lambert (?1699/1700–65), landscape artist and theatre scene-painter, to meet for a beefsteak dinner every Saturday from November to June.
8. Lord Sandwich: John Montagu (1718–92), 4th Earl of Sandwich, formerly (and again later) First Lord of the Admiralty, at this time out of major office, but with an appointment as Receiver of the Revenues in Ireland. He was among the whimsically irreverent brotherhood of the ‘Franciscans’, or the ‘Monks of Medmenham Abbey’ (sometimes referred to as ‘The Hell-fire Club’).
9. Colonel West of the Guards: The Hon. George West (1734–76), captain in the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, with the army rank of lieutenant colonel. Younger son of the 1st Earl de la Warr, and at this time a lord of the bedchamber to the Duke of York (the King’s brother).
10. Mr. Havard the Actor: William Havard (1710–78), actor and playwright, who had had by this point a thirty-year career, playing mostly minor parts and supporting roles, and was one of the mainstays at Drury Lane until his retirement in 1769. He had been the original Abdalla in Johnson’s play Irene in 1749.
11. Mr. Churchill the Poet: Charles Churchill (1731–64), an ordained clergyman, but an energetic satiric poet and political polemicist, famous among and feared by theatre people at this time as the author of The Rosciad (1761), which poem had satirically attacked many contemporary stage performers.
12. Mr. Wilkes the author of the North-Britton: John Wilkes (1725–97), MP for Aylesbury from 1757, was a vigorous opponent of the Bute administration. He and Churchill had published the first issue of the North Briton anonymously on 5 June of this year in response to the Bute government’s inauguration in May of a weekly paper, The Briton, edited by the Scottish novelist and historian Tobias Smollett (1721–71). ‘North Britain’ emerged after the Union of 1707 as a term for Scotland, and ‘South Britain’ for England and Wales, but, though used in Acts of Parliament and for some postal purposes, the terms failed to take long-lasting hold. The North Briton – scurrilous, abusive, full of insult and slanderous innuendo – was launching attacks, often with a ferociously xenophobic anti-Scots tone, on the Scottish-born Bute and his administration.
13. dedication without leave … half assented to: Boswell had met Edward Augustus (1739–67), Duke of York, next brother of George III, through Eglinton in 1760, and had without permission dedicated his The Cub at Newmarket to him. Eglinton does not seem to have brought Boswell and the young Duke together again.
14. Pope’s lines … thought: Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Second Moral Essay, Epistle II (‘To a Lady, of the characters of women’), ll. 97–8. From a section designated by Pope ‘Contrarieties in the Witty and Refin’d’.
15. the King & Queen … the Opera: George III and Queen Charlotte (1744–1818), daughter of the Duke of Mecklenberg-Strelitz in Germany, had married on 8 September 1761. The King’s Opera House, in the Haymarket, had Il Tutore E La Pupilla (a typical ‘pasticcio’ comic opera of the time) playing this night. Johann Christian Bach (1735–82), youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) and often referred to as the ‘English’ or ‘London’ Bach, had arrived in the summer of this year to take up appointment as composer here.
16. the Palace: St James’s Palace.
17. Edinburgh … amusing scenes: Boswell remembered his Edinburgh Saturdays very fondly, unlike his Sundays, and wrote so more than once to Johnston. He recalled moonlit Saturdays when he, Johnston and Boswell’s favourite boyhood tutor, the Rev. John Dun (1723–92), would walk to Leith (Edinburgh’s port, about a mile and a half from the city centre), and ‘come in by the Abbeyclose and eat Mrs. Bird’s tarts’, and Johnston would ‘go home with us, set yourself down in an easy chair in our room and stretching out your legs with a pleasing languor look out at the Window to the lofty Arthur-Seat on which the silver moon would softly shine’ (19 July 1763, Corr. 1, pp. 92–3). He recalled also that his pious mother had but ‘one Whim. She had toast for breakfast Six days in the week, but allways on Saturday, we were regaled with hot Rolls’ (Corr. 1, p. 105). He wrote to Johnston on 22 February 1763 about receiving the instalments of this journal: ‘It is comfortable and fine to receive such a supply of entertainment every week: especially as it comes on Saturday which is realy the most agreable in the week. As it was our day of freedom when at school, our fondness of it still continues and men who are engaged in business continue to have it as a day of relaxation after the fatigues of the week. But even those who have little to do, with whom one should think all days alike, still retain a kindness for honest Saturday’ (Corr. 1, p. 48). As will be seen in the later entries, Boswell establishes for himself various Saturday routines and rituals during this London visit.
18. frock suit: A suit with a frock coat (that is, a coat with tails or flared skirt to about knee level). It comprised a coat, waistcoat and breeches (i.e. knee breeches, buckled below the knee, worn with stockings).
1. Sunday 28 November: The first of Boswell’s surviving private daily agenda or to-do lists (not part of the journal), which he most often wrote first thing in the morning before he dressed, or occasionally last thing at night. They are lacking when Boswell has been put out of his usual routines for one reason or another, and some have apparently been lost or destroyed by his descendants, later owners of his papers.
2. the General’s & go to the Duke’s … church: Go to Lieutenant General Douglas’s, then the Duke of Queensberry’s, or, if the Duke has not yet returned to town, go to service at St James’s Church (in Piccadilly).
3. Home … at 4: That is, return home to Downing Street before 3 p.m. to dine; and if he has not been to church in the morning (‘forenoon’), go at 4 p.m.
4. then L’s … old cannong{ate}: Boswell, franker (though even here guarded) in his memoranda than in the journal, seems to be planning to use James Love’s absence at a club to renew his approach to Mrs Love, his ‘old cannong{ate}’ intrigue.
5. Northumb. House: Northumberland House, in Charing Cross, at the juncture of the Strand and St Martin’s Lane, was the splendid town residence of the wealthy and fashionable Earl and Countess of Northumberland, where Boswell plans to call and leave his card. Elizabeth Seymour Percy (1716–76), Baroness Percy, had in 1740 married Sir Hugh Smithson (1714–86), a Yorkshire baronet, who on the death in 1750 of her father (Algernon Seymour, 7th Duke of Somerset and 1st Earl of Northumberland) inherited the Northumberland title, and assumed the name Percy. In 1766 he would be created 1st Duke of Northumberland. Boswell and Lady Northumberland – notable in London society and at court, as a lady of the bedchamber to the Queen – had had earlier social dealings. She visited the nearly completed new Auchinleck House in 1760, and Boswell had written and sent to her a poem on her eldest son, Captain Hugh (Smithson) Percy (1742–1817), Lord Warkworth, and the Seven Years War: ‘Verses on Lord Warkworth’s Going a Volunteer to Germany, 1760’, published in Collection II.
6. Cause buy … week: Have his landlord and landlady buy candles. Wax candles were more expensive, and of better quality, than tallow; Boswell states his preference for them in his ‘Scheme of living’ (Appendix I).
7. 4to book … Expen: A quarto notebook, for his expense accounts.
8. tull: Variant spelling of ‘till’, probably reflecting Boswell’s pronunciation.
9. keep back to give out linnen: Unclear. Perhaps, economize on some matters in order to have clean linen (shirts and underclothing). Boswell mentions in his ‘Scheme of living’ that he ‘would have a suit of clean linnens every day’ (see Appendix I).
10. to order his ways: Psalms 119:9, ‘Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way?’ Boswell seems to be remembering some of the wording of the version in The Scottish Psalter (1650), ‘By what means shall a young man learn / his way to purify … ?’
11. want: Lack of, deficiency in.
12. the Park: St James’s Park.
13. Mr. Sheridan’s: Thomas Sheridan (?1719–88), Irish actor and theatre manager, now a theorist and passionate proponent of oratory, or elocution, and its many benefits. Boswell had first met him in Edinburgh in the summer of 1761, when Sheridan had come to lecture on elocution, oratory and ‘correct’ English pronunciation. The pair took to each other, and Boswell regarded him as a mentor.
14. at court: ‘Yesterday there was a numerous Court at St. James’s to compliment his Majesty on the Preliminaries of Peace being ratified and exchanged between Great Britain, France, and Spain’ (London Chronicle, 29 Nov. 1762).
15. his plan for me of the Temple: Sheridan had evidently suggested to Boswell that he be admitted to one of the Inns of Court in London. Sheridan had him entered in the Inner Temple in November 1761, but Lord Auchinleck (who wanted his son to follow him in a career in Scottish law) disapproved of the plan when he learned of it.
16. Mrs. Sheridan … Sidney Biddulph: Frances (Chamberlaine) Sheridan (1724–66), novelist and playwright, mother of the playwright and politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan (at this time a boy of 11, at Harrow School). Her novel Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph was published anonymously (though its authorship was an open secret) to considerable success in 1761, and appeared in a second edition this year.
17. Mr. Samuel Johnson: Johnson (1709–84), pioneering lexicographer, poet, novelist, essayist and editor, among the most dominant literary figures of his time, indeed of any. Boswell had come to London with hopes of meeting Johnson through the Sheridans. As he put it in the Life of Johnson, he had heard Sheridan in Edinburgh ‘frequently expatiate upon Johnson’s extraordinary knowledge, talents, and virtues, repeat his pointed sayings, describe his particularities, and boast of his being his guest sometimes till two or three in the morning’. But when ‘I returned to London in the end of 1762, to my surprise and regret I found an irreconcileable difference had taken place between Johnson and Sheridan’ (Life, p. 205).
18. the Scots Minister: Bute. Johnson had been awarded a royal pension of £300 per year in July of this year. Because of his criticism of the use of the pensions in the reign of the previous king, George II, those hostile to Johnson sought to represent the move not as a reward for his literary achievements, but as a political bribe, and Johnson’s acceptance hypocritical. (For Boswell’s further account of the ‘irreconcilable difference’, see the entry for 17 December.)
1. thin writing paper: Probably to keep the size and weight of his letters and packets, and thus the cost of postage, down. On 2 December Boswell again advises himself to get ‘thinner paper’ and his paper beginning at his manuscript page 57 (the middle of the entry for 3 December) is indeed thinner than that with which he began the journal. Boswell mentions in his entry for 12 December that Terrie supplies him with paper and other materials from his office.
2. If not in … Mrs. Ward: Perhaps, if Mrs Love is not in when he calls, he plans to call on Mrs Ward. Or, if James Love is in when he calls, he plans to call on Mrs Ward instead of renewing his sexual approaches to Mrs Love. ‘Mrs. Ward’ is probably the actress Sarah (Achurch) Ward (?1725/6–71), the now-estranged common-law wife of West Digges (and mother of as many as six of his children). She had acted in Edinburgh and Dublin with Digges, and was now at Covent Garden. Boswell had just seen her play the part of Dame Kitely in Every Man in his Humour on 19 November.
3. If time temple: If he has time, he plans to call again at the Inner Temple for his friend Temple.
4. At 4 Erskine: Explained in the journal entry (a dinner with Lady Frances Erskine).
5. feet washed: Having his feet washed long remained one of Boswell’s finest pleasures.
6. Concert with Φ & vow {… regard}: Probably another reference to Mrs Love, with whom he hopes to ‘concert’. F. A. Pottle speculated that Boswell used the Greek letter ‘Φ’ as a coded symbol for her (in his earlier diaries in Edinburgh) because it is the ‘initial letter of one of the Greek nouns meaning “love” ’ (Earlier Years, p. 77). The words ‘eternal constancy and regard’, written in Boswell’s shorthand cipher, are perhaps part of the ‘rhettoric’ he plans to ‘try’ with her.
7. Say as … but 30: Unclear. Perhaps, Boswell plans to discuss his rental charges with Terrie, as he plans to stay only thirty weeks and not a full year. Or, this may be a reference to the rental charge of £30 to be discussed with Terrie on 30 November.
8. Mr. George Garrick: George Garrick (1723–79), youngest brother of David Garrick, on whom he was financially dependent. He worked at Drury Lane without official title or position, assisting Garrick as a sort of deputy in various ways in the theatre’s operations.
9. Miss Pope: Jane Pope (c.1734–1818), actress, singer and dancer who, after juvenile roles, had made her adult debut at Drury Lane in 1759, and was now in her fourth season there, specializing in sprightly comic (‘soubrette’) parts. Her career on the London stage would eventually span fifty-two years. Boswell had just seen her in the role of Cherry in The Stratagem on 22 November.
10. Lady Francis Erskine’s: Lady Frances Erskine (?1717–76), daughter of John Erskine (d. 1732), Earl of Mar, a leader of the first (1715) Jacobite uprising (for which he was attainted), and his second wife, Frances (Pierrepont) (d. 1761), daughter of the 1st Duke of Kingston. She would succeed her half-brother Thomas Erskine MP (?1705–66) as heir to the line of the earls of Mar. Her husband was James Erskine (1713–85), an Edinburgh advocate and Knight Marshal of Scotland.
11. both her sons were there: Captain John Francis Erskine (1741– 1825), commissioned lieutenant in the 9th Dragoons in 1757, was later a captain in the 1st Horse, and retired from the army in 1770. He would be restored Earl of Mar in 1824. His brother, James Francis Erskine (1743–1806), became a colonel in the army.
12. Mr. Grant son to Sir Ludovick: James (from 1773, Sir James) Grant (1738–1811), eldest son of Sir Ludovick Grant (1707–73), 7th Baronet, of Castle Grant, Elgin, and his second wife Lady Margaret Ogilvie. He had studied at Westminster and Christ’s College, Cambridge, and a few weeks later was to marry, in Bath, Jane Duff (d. 1805) of Hatton in Aberdeenshire. He had succeeded his father in 1761 as MP for Elginshire.
13. some former days: 23, 26 and 28 November (as can be gathered from the names mentioned).
14. on the character of Hannibal: Hannibal (247–183 bc), Carthaginian general, defeated by Rome in the Second Punic War (218–201 bc).
15. he: Eglinton himself.
1. Break[fast] in Parlour: Have breakfast in the parlour (i.e. with guests, as will be seen in the next journal entry).
2. Crown court: An error for Crown Street, Westminster (corrected in the journal entry), where Boswell has found lodgings that he thinks will suit him better.
3. write C fully: Probably, write to Dr John Cairnie in Edinburgh, about Peggy Doig and her baby. Cairnie was also handling on Boswell’s behalf the resolution of a complicated financial transaction through which Boswell had left Edinburgh in debt for £40 to his shoemaker, Orlando Hart (d. 1793), in the Mint (or Gray’s) Close.
4. get franks from Dempst[er] & Coutts: Letters with ‘franked’ covers (bearing the seals or endorsements of MPs and officers of state) went free of postal charge, and the franking privileges were widely abused – as here. (The cost of postage at this time was usually paid by the recipient, not the sender.) In many of the later memoranda and journal entries, Boswell will be seen acquiring franks from MPs and others, who readily comply with his requests, for distribution to various friends and correspondents. Boswell’s friend George Dempster (1732–1818) had since 1761 been MP for Perth Burghs; James Coutts (1733–78), banker, of the Edinburgh banking family of Coutts, had become MP for Edinburgh, under Bute’s patronage, in February of this year, and was distantly related to Boswell. As MPs, Dempster and Coutts had franking privileges.
5. Douglas … Westminster Scholars: Archibald James Edward Douglas (1748–1827), now at Westminster School (after having been at Rugby), was supposedly the son of Lady Jane Douglas (1698–1753), sister of Archibald (d. 1761), Duke of Douglas, and second wife of Colonel Sir John Stewart (1687–1764) of Grandtully. He took the surname Douglas in 1761 when he was made the Duke’s heir. His education and upbringing were now being supervised by the Duke and Duchess of Queensberry. He was to be the subject of the lengthy and sensational Douglas Cause in the Scottish courts, when his right to the Douglas estates was disputed by the Duke of Hamilton, who claimed that he was not in fact Lady Jane’s son. Boswell as a young lawyer would play a prominent and passionate part in Douglas’s interest. George Douglas (b. 1754), son of Andrew and Mary Douglas, later matriculated to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1772, and took his BA in 1776 and MA in 1779.
6. old Victor … came in: Benjamin Victor (d. 1778), actor, theatre manager and author, at this time treasurer at Drury Lane, whose adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona was to open on 22 December and run till 2 February. He and Sheridan had been associated in the management of the Smock Alley theatre in Dublin in the 1740s and 1750s, and in 1755 he was appointed Poet Laureate of Ireland. His The History of the Theatres of London and Dublin from the year 1730 … appeared in two volumes in 1761 (a third volume came out in 1771).
7. Mr. Booth … Mrs. Booth: Barton Booth (?1679/1681–1733), a leading actor in the early part of the century (he was the original Cato in Addison’s tragedy), had for a time shared in the management of Drury Lane. He had acted at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in the late 1690s. Victor’s Memoirs of Booth appeared in 1733. Hester (Santlow) Booth (c.1690–1773), his second wife, was a leading Drury Lane actress and a dancer until her retirement from the stage in 1733.
8. Mrs. Pritchard … dramatic fame: Hannah (Vaughan) Pritchard (?1709/1711–68), actress and singer, now in the final years of an acclaimed career in both tragedy and comedy (her final performance coming in April 1768). She began acting in the 1730s, and joined Drury Lane in 1747 (with her husband, William Pritchard, as treasurer). Her landmark appearance with Garrick in Macbeth in 1748 won much applause. She played the title character, Irene, in Johnson’s play in 1749.
9. the directors of his English Scheme … their country: The Select Society of Edinburgh, following Sheridan’s successful elocution lectures in 1761, next year proposed the establishment of an academy under his direction, to be sponsored by ‘The Society for Promoting the Reading and Speaking of the English Language in Scotland’. The directors included Boswell’s father, Dempster and Eglinton. Sheridan planned to return to Edinburgh in the summer of 1762, but postponed his plans when he found that (in the words of a letter written by Mrs Sheridan) the directors had been ‘dilatory’, and had altered the proposal ‘through the ignorance or officiousness of some who had got some share of the conduct of it’ (to Samuel Whyte, 31 May 1762, quoted in Corr. 9, p. 179 n. 8).
10. Miss Colquhoun or Miss Bruce: Two of the young women Boswell knew socially in Edinburgh, and had semi-seriously thought of as marital possibilities. Katherine (‘Kitty’) Colquhoun (1742–1804) was the eldest daughter of Sir James Colquhoun (1714–86) of Luss, and his wife, Lady Helen (1717–91), sister of the 17th Earl of Sutherland. Lord Auchinleck was one of the trustees of her mother’s marriage settlement. Boswell had met her frequently in Edinburgh in the autumn of 1761, and wrote a complimentary poem, ‘To Miss Kitty C—’, which appeared in Collection II. In 1764 she married Sir Roderick Mackenzie (?1740–1811), 4th Baronet of Scatwell, a captain in the Guards. ‘Miss Bruce’, whom Boswell mentions meeting in his Edinburgh journals for February and March this year, could be one of several young women of that surname, and cannot be identified with certainty.
11. thanked Johnston: In his mind. In a later letter (21 July 1763), Boswell wrote to Johnston ‘of the dreary marriages which I have escaped, of the many plans for life which have played upon my Imagination and which I have with unreserved confidence disclosed to You’ (Corr. 1, pp. 95–6).
1. Try pen: Boswell is evidently testing a new writing instrument.
2. Gould: Lieutenant Colonel Nathaniel Gould (c.1730–86), of the 3rd Foot Guards.
3. pay Sword: Explained in detail in the journal entry, below.
4. Westminster: Perhaps to go to Crown Street and decline the lodgings.
5. C: Either Cairnie or perhaps another Edinburgh friend, the Rev. Edward Colquitt (?1716–?76), a minister of the ‘qualified’ Church of England congregation in Edinburgh, and a lively fellow member of the Soaping Club. If Cairnie, the main matters were probably, again, the care of Peggy Doig, and Boswell’s £40 debt to Hart.
6. Drury lane on frid[ay]: Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV was to play at Drury Lane on Friday 3 December, with Garrick in the part of the King, and Love as Falstaff. (But Boswell does not in fact see the play until 10 January.)
7. Old Quant the Porter: Quant, the porter at Queensberry’s London residence, has not been further identified.
8. half a crown: A coin worth 2s. 6d.
9. Mr. Jefferies Sword-Cutler to his Majesty: Nathaniel Jefferies (d. 1786), cutler to His Majesty’s household, in the Strand, at the corner of York Buildings. (The sword-cutler at this time was another man, James Cullum.)
10. Mr. Maine: William (later Sir William) Mayne (1722–94), merchant, born in Clackmannan, at this time a director of the Royal Exchange Insurance Co. He was created a baronet in April next year. Later, MP for Canterbury (1774–80) and for Gatton (1780–90), and elevated to the peerage as Baron Newhaven in 1776.
11. the Society … Arts & Sciences: Known now as the Royal Society of Arts (RSA), it was established first in 1754 on the initiative of William Shipley (c.1715–1803), painter and drawing master of Northampton, to promote commerce, art and manufacture. The society grew rapidly in the 1760s and attracted many prominent men and women to its membership. (Johnson became a member in 1756 and was active in its affairs, and his last membership payment was made this year.) In 1760, the year of Boswell’s first London escapade, it was much in public notice, and held London’s first exhibition of the works of living artists.
12. Mr. Box the Collector: George Box, since 1757 the society’s assistant secretary and collector.
13. six guineas … for lost: The RSA’s archives in London show that Boswell (his address given as ‘At L. Eglinton’s, Mayfair’) had been proposed for membership by Mayne at the meeting of 23 April 1760, and elected at the 30 April meeting. No subscription payments by him are recorded, and he is listed – no doubt as a result of this conversation with George Box – as ‘declined’ in the year 1762.
14. Lady Betty … Miss Dempster: Lady Elizabeth (Erskine) Macfarlane (?1734–94), Andrew Erskine’s eldest sister, who had married Macfarlane, some thirty years her senior, in 1760. Lady Anne Erskine (1735–1802) was the second oldest sister (for whom her brother, the Earl of Kellie, composed the well-known ‘Lady Ann Erskine’s Reel’). Jean Dempster (1736–?70/71) was George Dempster’s younger sister, and acted as his housekeeper. Boswell described her in his journal in Edinburgh for 3 November as ‘a fine woman, very well-looked indeed, elegant and remarkably witty’ (Jaunt, p. 100). Erskine was a lieutenant, but Boswell refers to all junior officers as ‘Captain’.
15. I was vexed at their coming: His reaction did not go unnoticed. Erskine recalled it in a letter to Johnston three and a half years later: ‘I remember well when I follow’d [Boswell] up to London, instead of recieving me with that warmth with that Cordiality which I expected he look’d upon me with a degree of horror …’ (2 June 1766, Corr. 1, p. 218). Boswell repeated his feelings about the arrival of the Erskines and Jean Dempster in his letter to Johnston of 6 December, though he added, ‘I like them as I used to do’ (Corr. 1, pp. 26–7).
16. hamely: Scots, ‘homely’, in the sense of ‘familiar’, ‘ordinary’, shading slightly over into ‘rough, coarse, blunt’.
17. fife family: Their family seat, Kellie Castle, was in Fife, across the Firth of Forth north of Edinburgh.
18. resemble Mr. Addison: In the polished and affable urbanity of his Spectator essays.
19. Sir Richard Steele: Steele’s essayistic touch was in general lighter than Addison’s, and he had written successful stage comedies, of which The Conscious Lovers (1722) is his best remembered.
20. the Kellie family: Called so because they were the children of the 5th Earl of Kellie (or Kelly). Thomas Alexander Erskine had succeeded as 6th Earl of Kellie in 1756.
21. A Play of Terence’s (the Eunuch) … Westminster School: Terence (?195–159 bc) was a Roman comic dramatist; his Eunuchus appeared in 161 bc. The boys at Westminster performed a Latin play annually, in December, in the school’s Dormitory. King’s Scholars were students here on the Foundation (i.e. funded, after competitive application processes, from the school’s royal endowment).
22. Churchill: Charles Churchill had attended Westminster School in 1741–48, as a King’s Scholar.
23. Dr. Markham the Master: William Markham (1719–1807), headmaster of Westminster 1753–65, later archbishop of York. Boswell remained impressed by the English public schools, and would send his son and heir, Alexander (1775–1822), to Eton, and his younger son, James junior (1778–1822), to Westminster.
1. Liecester Street: To Leicester Street, to the house in which Lady Betty and Lady Anne are staying, with Macfarlane. Andrew Erskine’s lodging is not specified, but it was evidently close by.
2. Dun … pay : Robert Dun (d. 1768), tailor, who had had dealings with the Boswell family earlier in Edinburgh, and was now in Lancaster Court, the Strand. The payment is probably for the ‘cloaths’ Boswell told himself to send for in his memorandum for 29 November.
3. Call Mrs. Lewis: Anne Lewis (?1738–d. after 1791), a strolling player (that is, an actor in the provincial theatres), who had acted under the name Mrs Standen in her one earlier appearance in London, in 1755, in the 1761 season in Edinburgh, and with the Norwich company in Yarmouth in December of that year. She was now at Covent Garden theatre for the 1762–3 season, having separated from the actor Charles Standen (1731–1800), whom she had married (in a ceremony later held to be invalid) at the chapel of the Savoy in 1755, and reverted to her maiden name. Her named parts at Covent Garden this season were Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, in Hamlet (27 September 1762, and again 18 May 1763), Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor (20 October 1762), and Lady Darling in Farquhar’s The Constant Couple (15 April 1763). The Theatrical Review for January 1763 noted of her, ‘Appeared Sept. 27th in the Queen in Hamlet, to which her figure was most happily adapted; and she might have been more agreeably received, had she not expressed less sensibility in her speaking, than affectation in her address’ (‘Account of New Players’, p. 39). Boswell mentions her name only in his private memoranda. In the journal as sent to Johnston, her identity will be concealed by the designation ‘Louisa’. She left the London stage after this season, married another strolling player, James Vaughan (d. 1788) in Leominster in 1766, and continued as a provincial actor in various different companies.
4. Send Lett[er] … {Mothe}r: Boswell wrote Johnston a short letter (which has not survived) dated 1 December, and received by Johnston on 10 December, ‘a few lines … concerning the Boy’, i.e. seeking details of Peggy Doig and the imminent birth of their child (Corr. 1, p. 25). That Boswell writes most of the word ‘Mother’ in his shorthand cipher suggests that he means not his own mother, but Peggy Doig. He had left Edinburgh anxious that Cairnie (with whom he had left £10 to cover costs) and Johnston should take care of all arrangements about her. On 24 November he had written to Johnston asking him to see Cairnie, talk to him about and then himself visit Peggy Doig, see the child after its birth, arrange for its baptism by the Rev. James Grant, who ministered in one of the Church of England’s chapels in Edinburgh (St Paul’s Chapel in Skinner’s Close), and to stand godfather (Corr. 1, p. 25). Peggy’s son, whom Boswell names Charles, was born on or about 7 December. Boswell hears the news first from Cairnie, and Johnston will write on 9 December with a full account of the baptism.
5. severe shocks … met with: The Duchess and Duke had lost their only children, Henry (1722–54) and Charles (1726–56), to early death.
6. Colonel Gould … a daughter of General Cochrane’s: Gould’s residence was in South Audley Street. Elizabeth (‘Betty’) Cochrane Hamilton Gould (c.1735–99), younger daughter of Major General James Cochrane (1690–1758) of Ochiltree and Culross and his wife Margaret (Hawkison) Cochrane, was a cousin of Boswell’s mother. She had been widowed in 1754, and married Gould (as his second wife) in 1759.
7. narrow: In this sense, parsimonious.
8. her sisters: The third sister was Lady Janet (‘Jenny’) Erskine (1742–70), who in the next year married Sir Robert Anstruther (1733–1818) of Balkaskie, Edinburgh advocate. This was a development that Boswell had expected. His brother David will write to him in October 1763 that ‘your Friend Robert Anstruther the advocate, is now Sir Robert, and Lady Janny Erskine is married to him, which is a thing I remember you told me would happen before you left Edinr’ (13 Oct. 1763; Yale C 465). In 1768, the year after Macfarlane’s death, Lady Betty married Rear Admiral Alexander Colville (1717–70), 7th Lord Colville, of Culross, some seventeen years older than herself. He died two years later.
9. wants: Lacks.
10. my stomach rises at it: Boswell’s strength of feeling comes not just because Macfarlane was much older than his wife, but from his own keen sexual attraction to Lady Betty. His journals at other times and letters (especially to Erskine) contain several fervent expressions of regard for her. In an earlier journal he described her as ‘a woman of noble figure and majestic deportment, uncommon good sense and cleverness’ (30 Oct. 1762; Jaunt, p. 98). In November 1776 he noted in his diary that he once had serious thoughts of proposing marriage.
1. half dress: Not fully dressed for going out.
2. consult cloaths & Ruffles: Perhaps, consult Eglinton about appropriate clothes (to wear to Lady Northumberland’s party: see n. 6 below). Later (12 and 21 December) Boswell refers to his landlord’s sister, Miss Terrie, as sewing his lace ruffles – trims at the end of his shirt sleeves.
3. Green Park: Between Piccadilly and St James’s Park.
4. by Chairman: Chairmen (who carried passengers in sedan chairs) could be hired to carry letters.
5. silver: Presumably small-denomination coins for gratuities for Gould’s servant.
6. Tuesday … when life dawns: Explained in the journal entry: an invitation to one of Lady Northumberland’s famously grand parties at Northumberland House on the evening of 7 December.
7. rout: ‘A fashionable gathering or assembly, a large evening party or reception, much in vogue in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’ (OED).
8. Miss Fannie … lively: Frances (‘Fanny’) Gould (?1755–1832). She and her brother (see the next note) were the children of Gould’s first marriage, to Frances Mary Buckworth (d. 1759). In later life too she would be considered ‘lively’, a wit and woman of fashion. In 1791 she married Lieutenant General Charles Horneck (1759– 1804), a well-known fashionable military officer, and in 1812 the Rev. Thomas Sedgewick Whalley (1746–1828), clergyman, traveller, poet and playwright (but the pair separated soon after).
9. his son: Bulkeley Gould (1753–1827), who would be commissioned ensign in the 59th Regiment in 1770. He later joined the East India Company’s service, sailing in 1779 for Bengal aboard the EIC vessel Walpole.
10. Mrs. Winyard … a Colonel: Mary (Maxwell) Wynyard (d. 1764), widow of Lieutenant General John Wynyard (1682–1752). Her son Lieutenant Colonel William Wynyard (?1732–1789) was at this time a fellow officer of Gould’s in the 3rd Foot Guards.
11. Miss Gwynne … Colonel: Possibly Lieutenant Colonel William Gwynne of the 2nd Regiment of Foot Guards (the Coldstream Guards), which had been fighting in some of the last major engagements of the Seven Years War, including the battles of Wilhelmstahl in June and of Brücke Mühle in September, and was now returning. The sister referred to has not been traced. But, if he erred about the rank, Boswell may mean another of Gould’s fellow officers in the 3rd Foot Guards, Captain Roderick Gwynne (1735–69), youngest of the three sons of the wealthy Welsh landowner Marmaduke Gwynne (1691–1769), of Garth, and Sarah (Evans) Gwynne (1695–?1769/70), and a younger brother of the Welsh MP Howell Gwynne (1718–80) (sitting at this time for Old Sarum, previously for Radnorshire). In December of this year he will be appointed Lieutenant Governor of the Fort William garrison in the Scottish Highlands, in 1764 Lieutenant Governor of the garrison at Berwick-on-Tweed, and from 1767 he will serve as Lieutenant Governor of the island of Tobago (where he died). The only unmarried one of his six sisters was Rebecca Gwynne (1724–98), the second eldest. She admired the Methodist religion of Charles Wesley (1707–88) and had assisted his courtship of her sister Sarah Gwynne (1726–1822), who married Wesley in 1749.
12. Sir Alexander Gilmour … first Regiment: Gilmour, 3rd Baronet of Craigmillar (c.1737–92), was at this time a captain in the 1st Foot Guards, and MP for Edinburghshire.
13. expedition to St. Cas: Saint-Cast, on the French coast, had been the scene in September 1758 of a calamitous retreat in which the British forces suffered heavy losses. As well as Gould, Lord Adam Gordon and Gilmour had seen action here, and Gilmour had been captured by the French.
1. in Bath & old grey & Stick sally to City: Dress in his Bath coat (of a heavy woollen fabric) and old grey suit, with his walking cane, to go to the City.
2. Send off North Brits to Digges: Digges had commissioned Boswell to send him the North Briton, and Boswell will do so each Saturday, its day of publication.
3. Auditer Monitor Briton: Three political newspapers. The Auditor was a second newspaper established by Bute (edited by Arthur Murphy, for whom see the journal entry for 28 February 1763), out of concern for the anti-administration attacks in the North Briton. The Monitor was a Whig periodical, opposed to Bute, founded in 1755 and edited by Arthur Beardmore (d. 1771).
4. parade: Meaning uncertain.
5. R Mcghye … franks: John Ross McKye (from whom Boswell plans to get more covers franked).
6. St. Paul’s: The great cathedral, designed by Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723), and built 1675–1710 after the destruction of its predecessor in the Great Fire of London, 1666.
7. Ladies of the town: St James’s Park, south of St James’s Palace and west of Whitehall, popular as a quiet and almost rural retreat by day, was by night commonly a haunt of prostitutes and their clients.
1. St. George’s Church: In Hanover Square, built 1721–4 to the designs of John James (c.1673–1746) as part of the project to restore London’s churches and build new ones after the Great Fire.
2. Review: Either the Monthly Review or the Critical Review, two influential literary magazines. The Critical Review; or, Annals of Literature, By a Society of Gentlemen, was, like The Briton, at this time edited by Smollett. The Monthly was founded and edited by Ralph Griffiths (c.1720–1803).
3. try tuesday if no scheme: Unclear. Perhaps, try to enlist the aid of Lady Northumberland (at her rout on Tuesday) if no scheme (to secure a commission in the Foot Guards) is agreed to this day with Queensberry.
4. Mrs. Phillips … Wednesday: A Mrs Phillips made and sold condoms, among other sex aid items, at the Green Canister, in Half-Moon Street, near the Strand. (Various modern sources identify her erroneously as Teresia Constantia (‘Con’) Phillips (1709–65), later Mrs Muilman, whose scandalous memoir, Apology for the Conduct of Mrs. Teresia Constantia Philips, had appeared in 1748–9; it is possible that the shop traded on the notoriety of her name.) Boswell here evidently means that he is planning to visit the Green Canister, buy a condom from Mrs Phillips, and on Wednesday seek out the red-cloaked prostitute he had noted in St James’s Park. Boswell’s planned purchase (see also the memorandum for 8 December) has probably been prompted by his encounter with the prostitute in the Strand on 25 November. He expected that the woman would have the ‘armour’ herself, but ‘she had none’.
5. good sermon on the Prophets testifying of Jesus Christ: The expression seems to have no precise biblical referent. The rector at St George’s at this time was Charles Moss DD (1711–1802), later bishop of St David’s (1766–74), and bishop of Bath and Wells (1774–1802).
6. The Dutchess of Grafton: Anne Liddel (c.1738–1804), wife of Augustus Henry Fitzroy (1735–1811), 3rd Duke of Grafton, later Secretary of State (1765), First Lord of the Treasury and effectively prime minister (1766), and Lord Privy Seal (1771). The pair had a stormy, scandal-ridden marriage (with Grafton openly keeping a series of mistresses), separated in 1765, and divorced in 1769 when the Duchess was pregnant with the child of John Fitzpatrick (1745– 1818), 2nd Earl of Upper Ossory, whom she married soon after.
7. a letter from my friend Johnston: This letter has not survived, but in it Johnston gave Boswell a ‘circumstantial excuse’ – apparently an indisposition – for his failure to come and see him off in Edinburgh. The expression is from Boswell’s reply to the letter, 6 December 1762 (Corr. 1, p. 25).
8. Equipages: Fine carriages, with their attendant footmen.
9. as the Spectator finely describes … without regard to property at all: Addison discussed the pleasures of imagination in a series of eleven Spectator essays, influential in theories of imagination throughout the century. Boswell is recalling no. 411: ‘A man of Polite Imagination is let into a great many Pleasures, that the Vulgar are not capable of receiving. He can converse with a Picture, and find an agreeable Companion in a Statue. He meets with a secret Refreshment in a Description, and often feels a greater Satisfaction in the Prospect of Fields and Meadows, than another does in the Possession. It gives him, indeed, a kind of Property in everything he sees …’ (21 June 1712).
10. Irene: Johnson’s play (pronounced ‘I-reen-ee’) had been produced and acted in by Garrick at Drury Lane, under the title Mahomet and Irene, in February 1749. It ran for a creditable nine nights, and brought Johnson good profits, but was not a theatrical success and was not revived after its first run.
11. Nova Zembla: An island group (in Russian, ‘Novaya Zemlya’, meaning ‘New Land’) in the Arctic Ocean, and part of Russia. Dempster is perhaps recalling Pope’s Essay on Man: ‘Ask where’s the North? at York, ’tis on the Tweed; / In Scotland, at the Orcades; and there, / At Greenland, Zembla, or the Lord knows where’ (II, 222–4).
1. Marche’s: William Douglas (1724–1810), 3rd Earl of March (later known as ‘Old Q’ and notorious for his gambling and generally dissolute life), was Queensberry’s first cousin once removed, and would succeed him as 4th Duke in 1778. Like Eglinton, who had introduced Boswell to him, he was a lord of the bedchamber and one of the Scottish representative peers.
2. Write … division of Journ: Boswell’s reply (written this day) to Johnston’s letter received the day before reports his ‘very great satisfaction’ at Johnston’s ‘kind letter’, as ‘it shows your being in earnest to clear yourself from the imputation of Neglect’ (Corr. 1, pp. 25–6). By this point Boswell had sent Johnston the first 28 pages of his journal, and was ‘quite elated’ at the thought of Johnston’s receiving and reading them. The letter from Johnston, as Boswell noted in the journal entry, put him ‘on a regular plan’ of sending the journal – on Tuesdays so that Johnston would receive it on Saturdays, with a request that he open it on Sundays when he could ‘read it when warm and comfortable in bed’. He gave Johnston instructions on how to store and preserve the journal pages, which he did not want folded: ‘You must lay it by carefully in the full Quarto size’ (Corr. 1, p. 26).
3. their laugh: That is, the laughter of the Kellie family, at his desire to become dignified and ‘reserv’d’.
4. Keep one Stock clean: A ‘stock’ was a neckcloth, of linen or cambric stiffened with a frame of pasteboard, folded closely around the neck and buckled or tied behind.
5. a letter to him: Probably the letter referred to in the memorandum for 3 December: ‘Send to Duke by Chairman’. ‘Your Grace’ is the standard form of address to a duke or duchess.
6. Lord Ligonier: French-born Sir John Louis Ligonier (1680–1770), Viscount Ligonier, later Field Marshal and 1st Earl Ligonier, was at this time commander-in-chief of the British Forces, and colonel of the 1st Foot (later called the Grenadier) Guards. Now 82, he had had a long and distinguished military career, but at this time (as Queensberry doubtless knew) had little or no role in the conduct of the army or influence on military appointments.
7. Mr. Gay: John Gay (1685–1732), poet and playwright, author of The Beggar’s Opera, so much admired by Boswell. The Duchess of Queensberry, Catherine (Hyde) (1701–77), well known for her patronage of authors, had been Gay’s benefactor and champion, and Gay had spent his last years in the Queensberry household.
1. Rout … Eglint[oune] there: Boswell hopes to speak to Eglinton tonight at Lady Northumberland’s rout.
2. them: Again, the Kellie family.
3. Wom Qualit: Boswell, wishing to avoid recourse to prostitutes, is hoping that he might meet a woman of quality (interested in sexual intrigue with him) at Lady Northumberland’s rout tonight.
4. a Concert: Eglinton was a patron of music and musicians.
5. The Prince of Mecklenburgh … & happiness: The Prince of Mecklenburgh: Karl Ludwig Friedrich (1741–1816), prince (later Grand Duke) of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, a younger brother of Queen Charlotte. He had arrived in England in January of this year. Duke of Kingston: Evelyn Pierrepont (1711–73), 2nd Duke of Kingston. Lieutenant general (later general) in the army, and Lord Lieutenant of Nottinghamshire 1763–5, but with little interest in political affairs he held no high office. Later, his duchess, Elizabeth Chudleigh (c.1720–88), whom he married in 1769, was found in a famous court case to be guilty of bigamy. Duke of Portland: William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck (1738–1809), 3rd Duke of Portland (having succeeded to the title on the death of his father in May of this year). In his later career he would twice be prime minister: in 1783 and 1807. Duke & Dutchess of Ancaster: Peregrine Bertie (1714–78), 3rd Duke of Ancaster and Kesteven, lieutenant general in the army, and Mary (Panton) (?1730–93), his second and much younger wife. He was a privy counsellor, Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire and Lord Great Chamberlain, in which capacity he had officiated at George III’s coronation. The Duchess, illegitimate daughter of Thomas Panton (1697–1782, keeper of the King’s horses at Newmarket), was a lady of the bedchamber and Mistress of the Robes to the Queen, a considerable social celebrity and leader in fashion. Dutchess of Hamilton[,] Lord Lorne: Elizabeth (Gunning) (1734–90), Dowager Duchess of Hamilton, one of the Irish Gunning sisters much celebrated for their beauty; also a lady of the bedchamber to Queen Charlotte. In 1759, the year after the death of her husband, James, 6th Duke of Hamilton, she married John Campbell (1723–1806), styled Marquis of Lorne, heir of the dukedom of Argyll, to which he would succeed as 5th Duke in 1770. He was MP for Glasgow Burghs 1744–61, and at this time colonel of the 14th Dragoons. Lord Litchfield: George Henry Lee (1718–72), 3rd Earl of Lichfield, a lord of the bedchamber, a privy counsellor, and a leader of Tory interests in the north of England. He had been elected chancellor of Oxford (of which he had been high steward from 1760), with Bute’s active backing, in September of this year. Oxford would devote its 1763 Encaenia (the annual commemoration of founders and benefactors) to a celebration of the Peace. Lord & Lady Garlies: John Stewart (1736–1806), Viscount Garlies, MP for Morpeth (who would succeed his father as 7th Earl of Galloway in 1773), and his first wife, Lady Charlotte Mary (Greville) (c. 1745–63), a daughter of the 1st Earl of Warwick. Lady Margaret Macdonald: Lady Margaret Macdonald (c.1717–99), widow (second wife) of Sir Alexander Macdonald (1711–46), 7th Baronet of Sleat. Eglinton’s sister, and Sir James Macdonald’s mother. Sir James, as Boswell’s next few sentences show, was at this breakfast concert too. Mr. Harris author of the Essays on Poetry music & happiness: James Harris (1709–80) of Salisbury, MP for Christchurch 1761– 80, Bute-administration supporter, and writer on music, art, philology and philosophy. Four days earlier he had accepted a seat on the Board of Admiralty. The essays to which Boswell refers are his Three Treatises, on (i) Art, (ii) Music, Painting and Poetry, and (iii) Happiness (1744). His main work, Hermes, or A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Universal Grammar (from which he became known as ‘Hermes’ Harris), was published in 1751. His aesthetic theory derived from the philosophy of his uncle, Anthony Ashley Cooper (1671–1713), 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury.
6. Three large rooms and the Gallery: Extensive and costly renovations of Northumberland House, under the architect Daniel Garrett (d. 1753), began in the late 1740s. In the 1750s, Lord Northumberland, on inheriting the house, began further remodelling by Garrett and, after Garrett’s death, by James Paine (1717–89). The renovations included the addition of wings designed to contain a huge ball room or gallery (to exhibit paintings that included copies of works of Raphael and other masters). The gallery, completed in 1757, could accommodate at least 600 people.
7. The King & Lady Northumberland … in their robes: Boswell’s slip for ‘The Earl & Lady Northumberland’. The two paintings Boswell saw – framed full-length portraits of the couple in their peers’ robes, hanging above two enormous telamonic marble chimney pieces – were by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92), and dated 1757, the year the gallery in which they were designed to hang was completed. Fire severely damaged this gallery in 1868. The chimney pieces were saved. One is now in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum, the other is at Syon House. The portrait of Lord Northumberland survives at Alnwick.
8. My Lord: The Earl of Northumberland.
1. be denied: Have callers told that he is not at home.
2. Love in a Village: First performance of this popular comic opera (which would have forty performances this season) with a libretto by Isaac Bickerstaffe (d. ?1812/13), Irish playwright, and based on The Village Opera (1729) by Charles Johnson (1679–1748). A ‘pasticcio’, arranged and with several of its songs contributed by Thomas Arne (1710–78). The heroine, Rosetta, was played by Arne’s pupil Charlotte Brent (1734/5–1802), and Farmer Hawthorne was played by Beard. Boswell’s pleasure endured: fourteen years later he went with Johnston to see a performance in Edinburgh, noting in his journal that ‘I was delighted with the music, and pleased to think that I had seen the first night of this piece at Covent Garden’ (20 Dec. 1776).
3. the Gallery … Pit: Gallery seats in the theatres were the least expensive, followed by the pit, with boxes the costliest. In the 1762–3 season, boxes were advertised at 5s., pit 3s., gallery 2s., and upper gallery 1s.
4. Bannockburn: In Stirlingshire, scene of the famous defeat in June 1314 of a vast English force, led by Edward II, by Scottish forces under Robert the Bruce (1274–1329).
5. were of: Boswell inadvertently repeats his ‘of’ (perhaps originally planning a new sentence).
6. Lord John Murray’s … the Havannah: The 42nd (Royal Highland) Regiment, known later as the Black Watch, of which General Lord John Murray (1711–87) was colonel for forty-two years after his appointment in 1745. The regiment had fought with great distinction in America, against the French at Guadeloupe and Martinique, and at Havana in Cuba against the Spanish, who succumbed on 12 August of this year after a gruelling land and sea siege of several weeks (during which some 6,000 British lives were lost, mostly because of disease).
7. if I had … about: ‘If I had a hold (‘grup’, i.e. ‘grip’) of one or two of the damned rascals I should let them know what they’re about.’
8. vulgar: Common people.
1. great day of business: The debates in Parliament on the Peace.
2. M’s letter: Not explained. Possibly a letter to his Edinburgh friend William McQuhae (for whom see 11 December, n. 17).
3. to C— tonight: The ‘C—’ to whom Boswell plans to send (or recommend?) Love in a Village has not been identified. Perhaps Colquitt. If the ‘C’ is in fact a poorly written ‘E’, Andrew Erskine may be meant.
4. Mrs. Ward: Mentioned in the memorandum for 29 November, though she makes no appearance in the journal. This mention suggests that Boswell has indeed been seeing her.
5. Red cloak’d Dulcinea: The prostitute whom Boswell noted while walking with Erskine in St James’s Park on the night of 4 December. Dulcinea of El Toboso, the object of romantic infatuation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote, was not at all a prostitute, but the name came to be used in this kind of way.
6. debate … on the Peace: The terms of the Peace were overwhelmingly approved, by 319 votes to 65.
7. to Dempster’s: Dempster moved the division in the House, and spoke and voted against the Peace.
1. the great Piercy: Henry de Percy (1341–1407/8), 1st Earl of Northumberland, powerful administrator and military commander in the reign of Edward III, figured prominently in the great dynastic power struggles later dramatized by Shakespeare in the plays of his ‘Henriad’. He helped depose Richard II, and aided the ascent of 2nd Duke of Lancaster, Henry de Bolingbroke, to the throne as Henry IV, against whom he later also conspired. He was killed in battle against forces loyal to the King at Bramham Moor. But Lady Northumberland’s connection with the Percy dynasty was less direct than Boswell (with his confessed enthusiasm for old families) implies. Her father, the 7th Duke of Somerset, was heir through his mother to the great Percy estates, and had been created Earl of Northumberland in 1749, with the arrangement that, in the event of the failure of his male line, the title should descend to his son-in-law.
2. closs: Scots variant of ‘close’.
3. I never played: Boswell had promised Sheridan in 1761 not to play cards for money for five years, having borrowed 5 guineas from him to settle a gambling debt.
1. Jermyn Street: Boswell is deliberately cryptic in this and a later reference (memorandum for 14 December) to ‘Jermyn Street’. He may have been contemplating a meeting with William Pitt (1708–78), the ‘Great Commoner’, later (1766) 1st Earl of Chatham, under whose popular prime-ministership (in coalition with the Duke of Newcastle) the British successes of the Seven Years War had come and to whom Boswell appears to refer in his memorandum for 13 December. He was now out of power and leading the opposition to Bute, and resided in Jermyn Street.
2. Erskine & settle play: Arrange with Erskine to come with him to see Love in a Village.
3. Davies & get paper … neglect: Thomas Davies (c.1712–85), an actor who had recently left the stage and reverted to his other profession, bookseller, with premises at 8 Russell Street, Covent Garden. A friend of Johnson’s. Boswell had met him on his first London visit in 1760, and is evidently feeling neglected by him now. The paper Boswell plans to acquire at Davies’s shop is presumably more stationery, for his journal and letters.
4. Macpherson the Translator of Fingal: James Macpherson (1736–96), author of the poetry he attributed to the third-century Gaelic bard Ossian, whose translator he purported to be, and which excited wide admiration and popularity. His Fragments of Ancient Poetry Collected in the Highlands of Scotland appeared in 1760, and in December 1761 he brought out Fingal; an Ancient Epic Poem, in Six Books: Together with Several Other Poems, Composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal. Translated from the Gaelic Language, by James Macpherson. These ‘translations’ aroused further wide interest, but also suspicions about their authenticity. He was in London at this time to arrange publication of his next Ossianic work, Temora, an ancient Epic Poem in eight books, Composed by Ossian, the son of Fingal, translated from the Gaelic language (1763).
5. Scotch Highlander: He was born in Ruthven, near Kingussie in Badenoch, Inverness-shire. Edinburgh-born Boswell, like many of his fellow Lowland Scots, turned at this time (since the defeat of the Jacobite forces in 1746) to a sentimental and nostalgic admiration of the Scottish Highlands.
6. nice: Precise, refined, sensitive.
7. boundaries in North America … expected: Britain had sought originally in the colonial American theatre of the conflict to break the growing French line of fortifications from Québec to Louisiana, by which France had sought to halt British expansion westward. In the event, Britain far exceeded its original expectations, capturing the French forts in the Ohio valley, and eventually winning the whole of Canada. Pitt spoke against the terms of the Peace treaty in the debate (despite a painful attack of gout) in a speech of some three hours long.
8. The City of London: The merchants, traders, bankers and financiers of the City had supported the war, which opened up to British control new and lucrative trading routes and opportunities for such commodities as sugar, tea, fish, furs, spices and silk, as well as slaves.
9. Jack Falstaff’s Scare-crows: Falstaff remarks of the sorry and inadequate group he has pressed into military service, ‘No eye hath seen such scarecrows’ (1 Henry IV IV.ii.38).
10. Dundass: Sir Lawrence Dundas (1712–81), 1st Baronet of Kerse, Stirling and Aske. War contractor and profiteer, he had been MP for Linlithgow Burghs, and a few days after this conversation he would be chosen MP for Newcastle under Lyme, sitting later for Edinburgh (1768–80), Richmond (1780–81) and Edinburgh again (1781). He had been created a baronet a few weeks earlier, after having controversially amassed a vast personal fortune through contracts and commissariat appointments for provisions, horses and wagons for troops in Germany in the Seven Years War. His ruthlessness, wealth and general extravagance became notorious.
11. at Child’s: In the first Spectator essay (1 March 1710–11), Addison wrote, ‘Sometimes I smoke a pipe at Child’s, and while I seem attentive to nothing but the Postman [a newspaper], overhear the conversation of every table in the room.’ Child’s is mentioned many times in the essays thereafter.
12. He says … one another: Digges wrote from Edinburgh (9 December), ‘I own I do not much approve of the Rancour of the North Britton, but I admire the spirit and wit with which it is written. – I assure You it makes up a great feast for my family Circle, and after we have banqueted on the genius of Mr Churchill, we never fail with pious Gratitude to drink the health of Mr Boswel … If Ever Any Anecdote of the House of Commons Affords matter worthy of transcribing You will much oblige Your poor Correspondent with transmitting it to him – I say poor, because I have Nothing Worthy of a return for such Valuable commoditys as You can & do send me. – Conversation is the Traffick of the Mind, for by Exchanging our Ideas we Enrich one Another. – You must trade at a loss with me …’ (Corr. 9, p. 331). Digges lived at this time with the actress George Anne Bellamy (?1731–88), at a house in Newhaven Road, Bonnington, near Edinburgh. Both had children from previous liaisons.
13. many inexcusable things: Digges was of genteel birth, being the elder son of Colonel Thomas Digges, of Chilham Castle, Kent, and the Hon. Elizabeth West (1695–1762), sister of John West (1693– 1766), 6th Baron de la Warr and from 1761 Earl de la Warr. After an army career, during which he saw action in the War of the Austrian Succession, he resigned his commission deeply in debt and took to the stage (thus shaming his family), at first in Ireland. Though popular as an actor, he lived extravagantly and was chronically in debt and in flight from creditors, and involved in tempestuous relationships with women. He had fathered children with Sarah Ward while still married to Mary Wakeling, whom he had married in 1746 (but from whom he separated soon after).
14. a pretty man: ‘Pretty’, a common usage at this time, means handsome, elegant, attractive. The word came later to refer more particularly to women and to children.
15. melancholy: In 1757 Boswell had suffered from a bout of severe depression, and in the summer of that year was sent to the spa at Moffat, in the Borders, for recovery. It was his second trip there, having been sent once before when he was 12.
16. acquainted with Captain Erskine … alive: Boswell first met Erskine, at Dempster’s suggestion, in May 1761 at Fort George on the peninsula of Ardersier in Scotland’s north, where Erskine’s regiment was then stationed. With a letter of introduction from Dempster, he sought him out while travelling on the northern judicial circuit with his father. Erskine had written and published poetry, including several items in Donaldson’s Collection I.
17. Mr. Mcquhae: William McQuhae (1737–1823), a young trainee clergyman, tutor to Boswell’s younger brothers, John (who will appear later in the journal) and David. He and Boswell had become friends. For him and Johnston, Boswell wrote his earlier ‘Journal of my Jaunt, Harvest 1762’, and McQuhae admired the journal and warmly encouraged its continuation. He would be ordained minister of St Quivox parish in Ayrshire in March 1764. He became a successful man of business and an eminent figure in the Scottish Church, but the friendship with Boswell lapsed.
18. all is vanity: The words of the Preacher in the Book of Ecclesiastes.
19. worthy ancestors: The Boswells of Auchinleck were cadets of the Boswells of Balmuto, in Fife. In 1504, King James IV of Scotland had awarded the Auchinleck estate (where the male line of the original Auchinlecks had died out) to Thomas Boswell (who later, with his older half-brother, Alexander Boswell of Balmuto, died fighting alongside the King at the great battle of Flodden in 1513).
20. the family of Marr: Erskine’s ancestor Sir Thomas Erskine (1566– 1639), the 1st Earl of Kellie, was a nephew of John Erskine (d. 1572), 6th Lord Erskine and 1st Earl of Mar (of the 1565 restoration of the title).
1. St. Margaret’s church Westminster: Parish church of the members of the House of Commons. In 1758 Parliament had granted £4,000 for extensive restoration work on it.
2. a Bureau: A writing desk.
3. milk-warm water: ‘Of the approximate temperature of milk fresh-drawn from the cow; new-milk warm’ (OED).
1. then dine Sher[idan] & if not in Beefsteaks: Sheridan is to call on Boswell this day. Perhaps the meaning is: dine with Sheridan either in (i.e. at Boswell’s lodging) or, if not, out, on beefsteaks.
2. the family: The Kellie family.
3. Elvira: A new tragedy, an adaptation of Inès de Castro by the French author Antoine Houdar de la Motte (1672–1731), by the Scottish-born poet, playwright and political writer David Mallet (who anglicized his name from Malloch) (?1701/2–65). Boswell, Erskine and Dempster greatly disliked Mallet, and they will later plot to try to disrupt the play on its opening night at Drury Lane (see the entry for 19 January 1763).
4. go to Pitt critical & recommend story: Perhaps, visit Pitt, and recount the story of his quest for a Guards commission, critical of those from whom he hoped for help. (Boswell does not actually meet Pitt during this London visit.)
5. Go to Bell’s as Mr. Gray soon: Meaning uncertain. Perhaps, Boswell is planning to go to an inn, Bell’s, under an assumed name, Mr Gray (possibly to prepare for a tryst with ‘Louisa’).
6. Go to Terris & ask for new apt: Meaning uncertain. These words are crowded around Boswell’s ‘Monday’.
7. poor fellow don’t forget him: Unclear who the ‘poor fellow’ is.
8. Mr. Townsend had resigned: Charles Townshend (1725–67) had been Secretary at War since March 1761 (he would become, briefly, First Lord of Trade in February 1763, and would be Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1766 to 1767). Notoriously variable in his political allegiances, he had written to Bute on 6 December that he wished to retire.
9. the new Secretary at war: Welbore Ellis (1713–1802), whose main task, in the aftermath of the Peace, was in fact the reduction of the army.
10. measure: The poetry’s rhythm and metre.
11. a Prose Tragedy: Frances Sheridan was at this time writing stage comedy. In 1766 Thomas Sheridan wrote from France, where the Sheridans were then resident, that she had begun ‘a Tragedy in Prose’ based on a two-volume continuation of the Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph. If completed, it has not survived.
12. debauching: In this sense, out eating, drinking and revelling.
1. getting Corporal, or going in Volunteer: Enlisting as an ordinary volunteer soldier.
2. if not humour Northumb. House: Visit Northumberland House if he is not in the mood (‘humour’) to write his journal.
3. Even hint {passion}: Boswell provides no clue about whom he might hint at a ‘passion’ for. The context suggests Lady Northumberland herself.
4. very cautious: If it is indeed Pitt that Boswell plans to visit in Jermyn Street, he would need to be cautious because of Pitt’s opposition to the Bute administration and to the Peace. The notables with whom he has so far associated have been affiliates and supporters of Bute and George III.
5. of Journey Expences: In the ‘Scheme of living’ he drew up soon after his arrival in London (see Appendix I), Boswell noted that he had already encroached on his first quarter’s allowance, as the cost of the journey from Edinburgh itself had come to £11. ‘I must endeavour to get my Father to pay this. I hope Doctor Pringle his great friend will think it reasonable, & will assist me.’
6. Get Erskine & study Scots Law: The Principles of the Law of Scotland: in the order of Sir George Mackenzie’s Institutions of that Law (1754), by John Erskine of Carnock (1695–1768), was the standard introductory authority at this time for Scottish lawyers.
7. Venus: Roman goddess of love and beauty (equivalent to the Greek Aphrodite).
8. the Stews: Brothels (or areas of cities occupied by brothels). The term developed from ‘stews’ in the sense of heated rooms used for hot-air or vapour baths, ‘on account of the frequent use of the public hot-air bath-houses for immoral purposes’ (OED).
9. interested: In the (now mostly obsolete) sense of acting out of motives of calculated advantage; opposite of ‘disinterested’.
10. Louisa: Plainly an adaptation of the woman’s name (Lewis), but a name also in current theatrical circulation. A character of the name occurs in Love Makes a Man, or, The Fop’s Fortune (1701), by Colley Cibber (for whom see 29 December, n. 1), which played at Drury Lane on 28 October, and would open again at Covent Garden for a fairly long run beginning on 8 January. It had played also at Covent Garden in May 1760, during the time of Boswell’s first London visit. A character of the name appears also in Frances Sheridan’s The Discovery (which play, to open on 3 February, will soon figure prominently in Boswell’s experience).
11. a pleasing undress: Dressed casually and comfortably, not formally (as for a public appearance).
12. Mr. Lee: John Lee (1725–81), actor, and formerly manager of the Edinburgh theatre, where he had been succeeded by Digges, and where he had appeared on stage with ‘Mrs Standen’ (as well as with Mrs Love). He had returned to Drury Lane in February of this year.
13. the Bonny bush aboon Traquair: ‘The Bush Aboon Traquair’, a popular Scottish song, with words by Robert Crauford (?1695– 1733), elder half-brother of Patrick Crauford MP (mentioned in Boswell’s entry for 9 January). Traquair House, home to the earls of Traquair, was in what was then Peeblesshire (now the district of Tweeddale), about 30 miles south of Edinburgh, and the ‘bonny bush’ of the song was a famous nearby grove of birches. Boswell would have been familiar with this song from his Edinburgh theatre attendance: it had been used in the ballad opera version of The Gentle Shepherd (1728) by Allan Ramsay (1686– 1758), in which the admired Digges played the lead, Patie, in productions in Edinburgh in 1758, and as recently as April of this year.
14. Mrs. Bland: Elizabeth (Dalrymple) Bland (1721–1816), wife of Lieutenant General Humphrey Bland (?1686–1763), commander-in-chief of the forces in Scotland from 1752, and colonel of the 1st (King’s) Dragoon Guards, with the ceremonial position of governor of Edinburgh Castle.
15. tassels … before her: The ‘tassels’ were the knotted cords by which a passenger (in this case Mrs Bland) would hold herself steady in the sedan chair. ‘Flambeaux’ were torches to light the way.
16. Anima rationalis: Latin, ‘rational mind’.
1. Wednesday 15 December: No memoranda survive for 15–26 December, having possibly been destroyed by Boswell’s descendants. They may have contained further references to the progress of the amour with ‘Louisa’, or references to other amatory plans and experiences.
2. Dolly’s Steak house in Pater-noster row: A popular steakhouse in Queen’s Head Passage, Paternoster Row, just by St Paul’s Cathedral.
3. Royal Cock-pit: In Birdcage Walk, on the south side of St James’s Park. Boswell is repelled, and pities the plight of the birds, but cockfighting was immensely popular with all classes in London and elsewhere, and large sums of money were gambled. It was outlawed in the early nineteenth century, initially with only limited success. This cockpit (subject of a well-known 1759 engraving by William Hogarth (1697–1764)) would be demolished in 1816.
4. & Waiter: That is (as the next sentence implies) a penny or some pennies as a tip for the waiter.
5. The Sentry near the house: By ‘the house’ Boswell means the ‘low Inn’. The sentry was probably one of those who were stationed in and patrolled St James’s Park.
6. Hobard … Watch-maker: Probably George Hobart, who completed his apprenticeship in 1717, and became a bankrupt in 1737, after which he had been in the Fleet Prison for debt.
7. enlisted … not touch him: That is, enlisted (after his bankruptcy) in the army to escape his creditors.
8. cut & drest & armed: The cocks were ‘cut out for battle’ by being clipped: having their comb and wattles cut off, tail feathers cut, and wing feathers sheared to sharp points. Sharp metal spurs (often silver) were fitted to the natural spurs on the birds’ legs.
1. Amesbury: In Wiltshire – Queensberry’s country seat.
2. his pupil: James Reid, aged 8, Boswell’s second cousin, with whose family Boswell’s was close. He was the son of Jean (Campbell) Reid (?1721–70), Lord Auchinleck’s cousin, and the Rev. George Reid (1696–1786), minister of Ochiltree parish, near Auchinleck, who had been chaplain to Lord Auchinleck’s father. McQuhae’s letter said that James had been ‘carried off in the sixteenth day of a nervous fever’. Boswell this day wrote McQuhae a long letter of kind Christian consolation, enclosing one for Reid (Corr. 9, pp. 336–7).
3. A little black young fellow her Brother: ‘Black’ means dark-haired and/or dark-complexioned. This boy may in fact have been Anne Lewis’s son, Charles Standen the younger, born 27 May 1758, at this time 4½ years old.
4. words of course: Merely formal or routine words.
1. Lord Chancellor’s: The Lord Chancellor was the highest judicial officer of the kingdom. The office was held at this time by Robert Henley (c.1708–72) (from 1760 Baron Henley of Grainge and later 1st Earl of Northington), on whom it was conferred on the accession of George III.
2. Mayor of Windsor: In a version of the same anecdote recorded by Boswell in his collection of witty sayings, ‘Boswelliana’, he notes that the dinner took place in Windsor. The Sheridans resided here from the autumn of 1759 to late 1762, when the mayors were George Hatch (1759, d. 1799), Henry Foster (1760, d. 1762), Henry Coombs (1761, d. 1790) and Richard Pinnock (1762, d. 1773). But the dinner may have taken place at a time when Johnson was visiting his good friend Topham Beauclerk (1739–80) at his house in Old Windsor. Beauclerk’s father, Lord Sidney Beauclerk (1703–44), had been mayor in 1739 and 1740.
3. transported … Plantations: The Transportation Act of 1718 had much extended the practice of punishment by transportation – that is, shipping convicted criminals to the American colonies, usually for use as labour in plantations. The mayor of Windsor served ex officio as one of the borough’s two Justices of the Peace, and presided over the borough court with its bailiffs (the guildhall functioned as a courthouse), though he did not actually have power or authority to sentence to transportation.
4. great cause of quarrel … give up mine: Sheridan had been granted a royal pension of £200 the preceding month, having undertaken to produce a dictionary of pronunciation and grammar, the prospectus for which, published earlier in the year, he dedicated to Bute. In Boswell’s account in the Life of Johnson, Johnson’s remark about Sheridan’s pension had been reported to Sheridan by James Macpherson, but without what Johnson had then gone on to say: ‘However, I am glad that Mr. Sheridan has a pension, for he is a very good man’ (Life, p. 206). Sheridan was, according to Boswell, ‘by no means satisfied’ on hearing at a later point that this was the rest of Johnson’s remark, and the two were never reconciled. Sheridan’s Dictionary, in two volumes, appeared eventually in 1780. As late as 24 June 1784 (less than six months before Johnson’s death) Boswell was still hoping for a rapprochement, but Sheridan held firm in his resentment. Of a dinner at the bookseller Edward Dilly’s, Boswell wrote, ‘At my desire old Mr. Sheridan was invited, as I was earnest to have Johnson and him brought together again by chance, that a reconciliation might be effected. Mr. Sheridan happened to come early, and having learned that Dr. Johnson was to be there, went away; so I found, with sincere regret, that my friendly intentions were hopeless’ (Life, p. 945).
5. I and Wedderburn … agoing: Alexander Wedderburn (1733–1805), later Baron Loughborough and Earl of Rosslyn; Scottish lawyer, MP at this time for Ayr Burghs, and a close associate of Bute. He would rise to high office in England, becoming Solicitor General (1771–8) and Lord Chancellor (1793–1801). (He too heard Sheridan’s lectures on pronunciation in Edinburgh, and Boswell noted later that he had been successful in modifying his Edinburgh Scots accent for a received southern English one.) Boswell’s later diaries report that he brought up the matter of who initiated Johnson’s pension in a conversation at St James’s Palace with Loughborough: ‘ “Old Sheridan claims some share in getting Dr. Johnson’s pension’ ”, to which Loughborough replied, ‘ “He rung the bell” ’ (16 May 1781; Laird, p. 357).
6. (as Henry Feilding stiled it) a trifling age: Henry Fielding (1707–54), playwright and novelist, wrote in the ‘Introduction’ to his ‘An Essay on Nothing’ (1743): ‘It is surprizing, that while such trifling Matters employ the masterly Pens of the present Age, the great and noble Subject of this Essay should have passed totally neglected.’
7. Mr. Prior … Secretary of state: Matthew Prior (1664–1721), poet and diplomat during the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14), negotiated the preliminaries in Paris in 1711 that led to the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), the peace following which came to be referred to as ‘Matt’s Peace’. This treaty ended the War of the Spanish Succession. Addison, among other government and diplomatic appointments, served as Undersecretary of State (Southern Department) from July 1705 to December 1706, and as Secretary of State (Southern Department) from April 1717 (three years after Queen Anne’s death) to April 1718. Johnson had written similarly of these men in his Rambler 26 (16 June 1750): ‘Prior became ambassador, … Addison secretary of state.’
8. Captain Plume’s opinion … discharge him: Plume is a character in Farquhar’s comedy The Recruiting Officer (1706). The line is slightly misquoted from Act I, sc. i:
KITE: I have listed the strong man of Kent, the King of the gypsies, a Scotch pedlar, a Scoundrel attorney, and a Welsh parson.
PLUME: An attorney! Wert thou mad? List a lawyer! Discharge him, discharge him this minute.
KITE: Why, Sir?
PLUME: Because I will have nobody in my company that can write; a fellow that can write can draw petitions – I say this minute discharge him.
9. Lord Holdernesse … £200 a year: Robert d’Arcy (1718–78), 4th Earl of Holdernesse, a political colleague of Pitt, was Secretary of State 1751–61 (being succeeded in that position by Bute). Elfrida, a dramatic poem in unrhymed verse, drawing on ancient British material and modelled on Greek tragedy, by the clergyman and author William Mason (1725–97), first appeared in 1752 and was later adapted for the stage. Holdernesse, to whom Mason was distantly related, presented him to the living of Aston, in Yorkshire, in 1754.
10. Mrs. Cholmondely … very well: Mary (Woffington) Cholmondeley (?1729–1811), known familiarly as Polly, was the younger sister of the celebrated Irish actress Margaret (‘Peg’) Woffington (Garrick’s former lover, who had died in 1760), and had acted on the Dublin stage with Sheridan. Her husband, the Rev. the Hon. Robert Cholmondeley (1727–1804), was the second son (not brother) of George Cholmondeley (1702/3–70), 3rd Earl of Cholmondeley, and Mary Walpole (d. 1731), daughter of the former prime minister Sir Robert Walpole (1676–1745). Rumour – as here (where Boswell does not identify his source) – often placed the scene of Cholmondeley’s youthful military distress, when a young officer in the 3rd Foot Guards, at the Battle of Fontenoy (May 1745), probably because his uncle, Colonel James Cholmondeley (1708–75) of the 34th Foot, brother of the 2nd Earl (hence the confusion in Boswell’s source of ‘brother’ with ‘son’), saw action there. But it was actually at Laffeldt, near Maastricht, in July 1747, site of a French victory which had cost both sides heavy casualties. He had on his return to England taken holy orders, and was at this time rector of St Andrew’s, Hertford.
11. Doctor Chamberlain: Richard Chamberlaine (d. ?1784), surgeon, a popular and sociable man, said by a later family memoirist to have been Frances Sheridan’s ‘favourite brother’, who regularly called on her after his medical rounds (Alicia Lefanu, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Frances Sheridan … By her Granddaughter (London: G. and W. B. Whittaker, 1824), pp. 232–3).
12. Francis’s translation of Horace: Philip Francis DD (?1708–73), Irish clergyman, translator and author, published the first parts of his Odes, Epodes, and Carmen Seculare of Horace in Latin and English in Dublin in 1742 and in London in 1743, with later parts in 1746. They proved popular, and were reissued in four volumes in 1747 and in many editions thereafter. The poems of Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus) (65–8 bc), Roman poet, satirist and literary theorist, were widely taught in schools at this time. (Boswell’s father rewarded him as a boy for every ode of Horace he could learn by heart.) English poetic satire up to the time of Johnson was heavily influenced by them.
13. to the present time, like Swift’s two imitations: Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) was Sheridan’s godfather, and a close friend of Sheridan’s father. The poems referred to are probably Swift’s imitations of part of Horace’s Seventh Epistle of the First Book – ‘Harley, the Nation’s great Support / Returning home one Day from Court’ (1713) – and of part of the Sixth Satire of the Second Book – ‘I often wish’d, that I had clear / For Life, six hundred Pounds a Year’ (1714). In the first of these, Swift wittily updates and adapts the characters and situations of the Horatian original – Philippus, a well-known Roman lawyer, and his patronization of a humble street salesman or auctioneer, Volteius Mena – to treat of the politician and literary patron Robert Harley (1661–1724), 1st Earl of Oxford (and in 1711–14 First Lord of the Treasury and thus in effect Queen Anne’s prime minister), and Swift himself.
14. Pope’s: Which of the poems in Pope’s great body of Horatian work Boswell has in mind are not specified. Between February 1733 and March 1738 Pope published eleven separate poems as ‘Imitations of Horace’ (four Satires, five Epistles and two Odes). These were collected and augmented as Satires and Epistles of Horace Imitated, and appeared thus grouped in the 1738 edition of Pope’s Works (vol. II) that year. Pope carried on and advanced the Swiftian technique of witty adaptation to contemporary British political and cultural circumstances (rather than the directly translational purposes of some earlier English poetic renderings of Horace).
15. Juvenal: Decimus Junius Juvenalis (c.60–c.136), Roman satirist whose sixteen satires, more acerbic than the polished and urbane Horace’s, expressed a savage indignation against vice and folly. Sheridan may be thinking of a poem such as Pope’s imitation of Epistle II, i (usually known as the ‘Epistle to Augustus’), in which the unpopular King George II is (in ironic tribute) substituted for the Roman emperor Augustus, and which has passages notably and powerfully Juvenalian in tone.
16. Lord Shelburne: John Petty (1706–61), 1st Earl of Shelburne, Irish peer, MP for Chipping Wycombe 1754–60, and from 1760 Baron Wycombe in the peerage of Great Britain. He was among the Sheridans’ circle of friends when they first moved to London in 1758.
1. Captain James Webster newly arrived from Germany: Webster (1740–81), Boswell’s cousin, was the second son of Mary (Erskine) Webster (1715–66), elder sister of Boswell’s mother, and Alexander Webster DD (1707–84), distinguished Edinburgh churchman. He was a lieutenant in the 33rd Foot (known later as the Duke of Wellington’s regiment), which had been sent to Germany in May 1760 as part of what the Prime Minister, Newcastle, called ‘the Glorious Reinforcement’, and joined the forces operating under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick (1721–92). Webster was fatally wounded in the War of American Independence at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse, North Carolina, 15 March 1781, where he commanded a brigade. Boswell noted in his journal for 10 June 1781 that he ‘cried much’ at the service for him in Edinburgh (Laird, p. 378).
2. a plain frock: Plain gentleman’s dress (a frock suit), rather than his nobleman’s regalia (in which it would have been inappropriate for the Duke to be out walking).
3. a half-star … a whole moon: The joke about the moon is obscure, but the Duke of Kingston, when installed as a Knight of the Garter in 1741, ‘modestly folded back the front of his coat to hide the star’ (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).
4. a Platonist: In this sense, one who loves only ‘platonically’ – i.e. chastely and without sexual activity.
1. Mr. Murray of Broughtoun: James Murray (1727–99) of Broughton, Scottish MP – at this time for Wigtownshire, later for Kirkcudbright Stewartry – and a wealthy and politically influential figure in Ayrshire. Boswell records a pleasant conversation with him in Scotland on 23 September, during which he sought Murray’s aid in pursuing his Guards commission ( Jaunt, p. 60).
2. Captain Keith Stewart: Captain the Hon. Keith Stewart RN (1739–95), younger brother of Lord Garlies, and James Murray’s brother-in-law, who would later rise to the rank of vice-admiral. He had been brought in as MP for Wigtown Burghs, briefly, earlier in the year, and received his promotion to post captain on relinquishing the seat.
3. St. John’s Chapel: In Chapel Street, at the north end of Bedford Row in Bloomsbury.
4. calling it … faculties: For Boswell’s later published use of this remark, see n.1 to 21 July.
5. Mr. Steede: John Stede (or Steed) (1687–1768), long-serving prompter at the Covent Garden theatre.
1. shifted: Dodged, evaded.
1. was put to my shifts: Had to exercise my resourcefulness.
2. cost me 14½: That is, cost one shilling and twopence-halfpenny.
3. a ½ worth: A halfpenny’s worth.
4. Noble’s circulating Library: Francis Noble (d. 1792), bookseller and library proprietor, had premises at this period opposite Gray’s Inn Gate, Holborn. With his brother John (d. 1797) he had opened one of the first circulating libraries in London, in about 1739, though they later maintained separate businesses. John Noble’s premises were in St Martin’s Court.
5. Captain Douglass of Kilhead & Captain Maxwell of Dalswinton: Two young Scots army officers, related to Boswell. William Douglas (c.1731–83), later Sir William, 4th Baronet of Kelhead, was at this time cornet in the 2nd (Royal North British) Dragoons (‘the Greys’). His grandmother and Boswell’s mother were half-sisters. He soon after retired from the army and joined Queensberry’s household. Queensberry brought him into Parliament as MP for Dumfries Burghs, 1768–80. William Maxwell (?1728–96), Douglas’s cousin (son of his aunt Janet Douglas and Hugh Maxwell of Dalswinton), served in the 6th Regiment of Foot.
1. Buckingham-House: On the western side of St James’s Park, and built in 1703–5 for John Sheffield (1647–1721), 1st Duke of Buckingham and Normanby. George III had purchased it earlier this year as a palace for Queen Charlotte, and it became known as the ‘Queen’s House’. It would come to serve as the principal London residence of the royal family (removed from the state functions of St James’s Palace). In the 1820s, George IV would have it extended and rebuilt, at great and controversial expense, as Buckingham Palace.
2. Battle of Dettingen: In Bavaria, scene of a victory (June 1743) in the War of the Austrian Succession for British, Hanoverian and Austrian forces (nominally under George II) over French forces under the command of the duc de Noailles. In this battle, ‘Hanoverian artillery fire … was deadly, by one account doing “incredible execution …” ’ (Reed Browning, The War of the Austrian Succession (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 139).
3. the Mall: A wide walkway on the north side of St James’s Park, running from Constitution Hill to Spring Gardens.
4. in the feild: That is, in the field of battle.
5. the morning fashion: Wearing a dress for informal day wear. According to newspaper notices this month, Mrs Lewis was to have played the part of Melinda in The Recruiting Officer at Covent Garden this night (but the playbills list a different actress in the part).
6. saluting: Kissing.
7. Lord Northumberland … me: The journal, oddly, does not record this call.
8. tolboothkirk: Webster’s father, Dr Alexander Webster, was minister of Edinburgh’s Tollbooth Church, one of the four churches into which St Giles’ was subdivided. He was a member of the ‘High-Flying’ (i.e. Strict, not Moderate) party in the Edinburgh Church, and a leading Scottish supporter of the Calvinist Methodist George Whitefield (for whom see 8 January, n. 1).
1. Cornetcy of Dragoons: A cornet was the fifth (i.e. most junior) commissioned officer in a troop of cavalry (corresponding to an ensign in infantry regiments). Dragoons were fighting regiments, not (like the Guards) members of the royal household troops, stationed in and near London.
2. Oliver Cromwell’s time: Cromwell (1599–1658), Puritan military commander and parliamentarian, was a leader of the English civil wars which overthrew Charles I (1600–49). He ruled after King Charles’s execution during the subsequent Commonwealth, or Interregnum, as ‘Lord Protector’ from 1653 until his death.
3. canting: ‘Given to using religious or pietistic language formally or affectedly’, from ‘cant’, meaning ‘Unreal or affected use of language’; specifically ‘the formal use of religious or pietistic phrases; hypocritical talk … In 17th c. applied in ridicule to the preaching of Presbyterians and Puritans’ (OED).
4. Charles the second: Charles (1630–1685), son of Charles I, escaped to France after the defeat of his forces by Cromwell at Worcester in 1651. He came to the throne as Charles II at the Restoration of 1660.
5. In James the first’s time … not carried through: George Villiers (1592–1628), 1st Duke of Buckingham, favourite of James I (James VI of Scotland) (1566–1625), rose to great power, wealth and political influence in the courts of James I and his son Charles I. He proposed in the House of Lords in March 1621 an academy ‘for the breeding and bringing-up of the nobility and gentry of this kingdom in their young and tender age’. A committee was appointed to frame proposals. Little was done, but ‘Buckingham … continued to press the matter … recognis[ing] the need for some institution similar to the academy for nobles established in France’ (Roger Lockyer, Buckingham: The Life and Political Career of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham (London: Longman, 1981), p. 97). He returned to the proposal, twice, in 1628, but he was murdered in August of that year. Armand Jean du Plessis (1585–1642), cardinal and duc de Richelieu, powerful prelate and statesman in the reign of Louis XIII (1601–1643, r. from 1610), founded the Académie française in 1634/5.
1. a couple of Shillings: On his sartorial and tonsorial preparations.
1. most agreable feelings: Boswell particularly enjoys this Christmas (his first in England) because, like the other festive occasions of the Christian year, Christmas was little marked by the Church of Scotland. He wrote to Johnston on 28 December, ‘I am pleased to view London at this time of hearty festivity. According to the custom of England I wish you the compliments of the season. Many a merry Christmass may you see[,] my honest Johnston’ (Corr. 1, p. 34).
2. St. Paul’s Church … the Bishop of Oxford: By ‘St. Paul’s Church’ Boswell means the cathedral. John Hume DD (1706–82) was bishop of Oxford 1758–66.
3. glad tidings of great joy: ‘And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord’ (Luke 2:10–11).
4. Bill of Mortality: Bills of mortality, begun in the sixteenth century, were weekly published statements (not always entirely accurate) of deaths in certain parishes in and around London.
5. cholics: Colic. The Gentleman’s Magazine for December 1762 lists 56 deaths from December 1761 to December 1762 attributed to ‘Cholick, Gripes, and Twisting of the Guts’ (p. 633).
6. Coutts’s: Near Durham Yard, the Strand.
7. Davies’s: On 18 December, Davies had invited Boswell to dine with him this day, and meet Johnson and ‘some more men of letters’.
8. Johnson was gone to Oxford: On 21 December, Johnson wrote to Frances Reynolds (1729–1807), sister of Sir Joshua, ‘I am going for a few Days or weeks to Oxford, that I may free myself from a cough, which is sometimes very violent’ (The Letters of Samuel Johnson, The Hyde Edition, ed. Bruce Redford, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992–4), vol.1, p. 216). Johnson’s connections with Oxford University were close. He had entered Pembroke College as a young man (but left without taking a degree in December 1729). He visited Oxford in 1754, forming several warm friendships there in a stay of five weeks. One consequence of that visit, made as he neared the end of work on his Dictionary, was that his Oxford friends set in motion the process of securing him an honorary MA (conferred on 20 February 1755). He visited again in August 1755 and for several weeks in 1759, when he may indeed have contemplated living there, and made more than twenty visits in later life. He was awarded an honorary DCL by Oxford in 1775.
9. Mr. Dodsley: Robert Dodsley, author, bookseller and playwright, had retired after a prolific, innovative, ambitious and influential publishing career. He had published many of Johnson’s significant works to date.
10. Mr. Goldsmith: Oliver Goldsmith (?1728–74), Irish author, a friend of Johnson’s who would be among the charter members of the famous Club (sometimes referred to as the Literary Club, founded in February 1764 by Sir Joshua Reynolds). He had authored much miscellaneous writing anonymously or pseudonymously by this time, but it is not clear from this entry whether or not Boswell knew of it. His poem The Traveller (1764) was the first of his works to have his name on the title page. The works for which he remains best remembered all came later: his novel The Vicar of Wakefield, though already written, was not published until 1766, his poem The Deserted Village in 1770, and his comedy She Stoops to Conquer in 1773. He would become one of the most important of the subsidiary figures in Boswell’s Life of Johnson.
11. Miscellaneous Poetry … your Collection: Dodsley’s widely read anthology A Collection of Poems by Several Hands appeared first in three volumes in 1748, then in a more successful edition (with a fourth volume) the next year, and it expanded to six volumes by 1758. A new edition (in six volumes) was to appear in 1763. It was thereafter at various times revised and augmented, ran through several new editions, and became the most commercially successful of the eighteenth century’s many published poetry compilations. Goldsmith’s general claim in this conversation is that a great number of the (‘very poor’) poems included by Dodsley in his Collection were minor or ephemeral, not of the stature of the work of such poets as Pope and Dryden (see next note), already (in 1762) otherwise little read or forgotten.
12. Dryden: John Dryden (1631–1700), dramatist, poet, political polemicist and literary theorist, who became Poet Laureate in 1668.
13. Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day: Dryden’s A Song for St Cecilia’s Day (1687).
14. Absalom & Achitophel: Dryden’s political satire of 1681, which, under biblical names, satirized the Exclusion Crisis of the 1680s – the attempts to block the succession to the throne of Charles II’s Catholic brother James, Duke of York (later James II).
15. the rape of the lock: Pope’s mock-epic poem The Rape of the Lock appeared in its initial two-canto version in 1712, and in its expanded five-canto version in 1714.
16. the Spleen: The Spleen, a poem by Matthew Green (1696–1737), published posthumously in 1737. It had been included by Dodsley in vol. 1 of his Collection, and had been republished as recently as 1754.
17. Gray’s odes: Thomas Gray (1716–71). His first published poem was Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1747). Odes by Mr. Gray (his two Pindaric odes, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard) were the first poems printed at the Strawberry Hill press of Horace Walpole (1717–97), published by the Dodsleys, in August 1757. Gray’s poems were among the important new departures from the dominant ‘Augustan’ and satirical traditions of Dryden and Pope. Dodsley had included (anonymously) in vol. 2 of his 1748 Collection Gray’s ‘An Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College’, ‘Ode’ (i.e. ‘Ode on the Spring’), and ‘Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold-Fishes’.
18. the rumbling thunder … Sheene: Goldsmith parodies the seemingly simple diction, rhyme schemes and deliberate archaisms of Gray’s ‘Odes’ (particularly The Bard). (The ‘Welkin Sheene’, a phrase that occurred in John Gay’s burlesque pastoral poem The Shepherd’s Week (1714), means the ‘shining sky’.) Goldsmith had written very similarly of Gray’s ‘Odes’ in the Monthly Review five years earlier (1757, pp. 239, 242).
19. Carrmen: A carman was a carter or carrier.
20. Pantomime of Shakespear … shiftings: Elaborate scenic stage spectacle was a new and popular development in the patent theatres over the course of the eighteenth century. Shakespeare’s plays were generally adapted and altered by other authors for the stage, and seldom seen in the original.
21. Rambler … lighter performance: Johnson’s 201 Rambler essays, meditations on a wide range of social, political, moral, aesthetic and other topics, had appeared every Saturday and Tuesday from March 1750 to March 1752. Though not initially widely read, they afterwards went through ten collected printings in Johnson’s lifetime. His 104 Idler essays, lighter in tone, shorter, and closer in general style to the Spectator essays, appeared each Saturday in the Universal Chronicle from April 1758 to April 1760. They first appeared in a collected edition in 1761.
22. kept as a blackguard: Presumably, in deprived, impoverished circumstances.
1. Whitehall Chappel: In the Banqueting House of Whitehall Palace, the one significant survival of the fire that destroyed most of the palace complex in 1698. Originally designed and built in 1619–22 by Inigo Jones (1573–1652), it was refitted as a chapel by Wren, and continued to be used as a chapel until 1890.
2. I this day … military life: The letter, dated 22 December, was written from Amesbury. As well as what Boswell summarizes, Queensberry noted that ‘altho’ you are a young man, yet you are above the age when an Ensign’s Commission is thought desireable. I found it would be in vain to apply to my Lord Ligonier, having met with an intimate friend of his, the day before I came out of town, who assured me it would be to no purpose to sollicite him, nor indeed any body else, in the present state of the Army’ (Corr. 9, pp. 344–5). Most ensigns at this time were lads of about 15 years old.
3. my Father was at the bottom of it: Boswell’s suspicion stayed with him all his life: in a third-person essay he wrote of himself in two parts for the European Magazine of May and June 1791 (to help promote interest in his just-published Life of Johnson), he wrote that at this period ‘Queensberry … was to obtain for him what he wished; but, perhaps from a secret understanding with Lord Auchinleck, it was delayed from time to time.’
4. being a private man: Enlisting as a regular soldier (rather than pursuing an officer’s commission).
1. closet has not been looked into: It is not clear (given the missing memoranda for 15–26 December) what Boswell feared had been ‘looked into’ in his closet.
2. will publish volume in Winter next: Possibly the first reference to the secret plan to collect, edit and publish a facetious volume of his correspondence with Andrew Erskine (the volume will in fact appear on 12 April 1763). This plan may have been among the topics canvassed by Erskine and Boswell in their talk of ‘near two hours’ on Christmas night. All mention of this scheme – which will be chief among Boswell’s various literary activities this winter – is kept out of the journal itself until the actual publication date.
3. Eglint[oune]’s 3 Shill: Either Boswell needs to borrow 3 shillings from Eglinton, to tide him over, or, Eglinton owes him 3 shillings.
4. Sell lace: Another small money-saving scheme, explained in the entry for 28 December.
5. vive la Bagatelle: French, ‘long live trifles (or foolery)!’ Boswell wrote to Erskine on 25 August 1761, ‘The Boswells, you know, came over from Normandy, with William the Conqueror, and some of us possess the spirit of our ancestors the French. I do for one. A pleasant spirit it is. Vive la Bagatelle, is the maxim. A light heart may bid defiance to fortune’ (Corr. 9, p. 88); and he had written in his journal for 15 September 1762 about being ‘Full of Swift’s maxim of vive la Bagatelle’ ( Jaunt, p. 47). The phrase occurs in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (I (1759), xix), by Laurence Sterne (1713–68), which Boswell knew and admired, but he probably knew of the expression as ‘Swift’s maxim’ from Pope’s First Book of Horace Imitated: ‘And Swift cry wisely, “Vive la bagatelle!” / The Man that loves and laughs, must sure do well’ (Ep. VI, 128–9).
6. tore the skin of your leg: Lady Northumberland had injured a leg three years earlier, evidently in some kind of fracas with another noblewoman, Lady Rebecca Poulett (1716–65), youngest daughter of the 1st Earl Poulett. According to Horace Walpole, in a letter of 23 December 1759, she was ‘laid up with a hurt in her leg; Lady Rebecca Poulett pushed her on the birthnight against a bench’ (The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al., 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–83), vol. 9: Horace Walpole’s Correspondence with George Montagu, I, 1736–1761, ed. W. S. Lewis and Ralph S. Brown, Jr, 1941, p. 264).
7. welch rabbit & Porter … servility: Welsh rarebit, a melted cheese and butter mixture, flavoured, and served on toast. Porter, a dark-brown ale, said to have been so called because it was popular with ‘porters and the lower class of labourers’ (OED). Ortolans, small birds of the bunting family, were eaten as a delicacy – whole and roasted, after having been caught live. Boswell’s general point is that he would rather live as a poor but independent man than feast luxuriously as a result of servility to the wealthy and powerful.
1. Sir Harry: Sir Henry Erskine (?1710–65) of Alva and Cambuskenneth, to whom Boswell is planning this calculated speech, was at this time colonel in the 1st Foot (the Royals), with the army rank of major general, and MP for Anstruther Easter Burghs. He was a supporter and a close confidant of Bute. His wife, Janet (Wedderburn) (d. 1797), was Alexander Wedderburn’s sister. He and Boswell were distantly related, having a common ancestor in Sir Charles Erskine (d. 1663) of Alva.
2. Captain Maud of the Blues: Paravacini Mawhood (1721–1808), captain in the Royal Regiment of Horse Guards (‘the Blues’). He had seen action in Germany in 1761. He retired from the regiment this year.
3. to a Jeweller’s: A man’s hat of this time could be braided with silver or gold lace.
1. old Cibber: Colley Cibber (1671–1757), actor, playwright and autobiographer, prominent in the earlier eighteenth-century theatre world. He retired from the stage in 1733, but returned several times and made his last appearance in 1746. His memoir, Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, appeared in 1740.
2. Fingal who is realy a highland Claymore: That is, James Macpherson, being described as very much a rough, blunt Highland type. A claymore was the ancient two-edged broadsword of the Scots Highlanders.
3. Gray’s fine Elegy in a Churchyard … celebrated: Gray’s Elegy Wrote in a Country Church-yard appeared in 1751, and concerns humble rural village folk. Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry aspired to epic sweep and grandeur, treating of war, battles, chieftains and kings. To ‘saw’ means to ‘sow’.
4. Lady Jenny: Lady Janet Erskine.
5. crampet … life: The crampet is the protective metal guard at the end of a walking staff; Boswell means at either the highest end or the lowest end of life.
6. Rake: In this sense, one who lives in a dissipated or irregular way.
1. leave Ode Tragedy: Boswell’s Ode to Tragedy, a copy of which he plans to leave with Sheridan when he calls on him, was published in Edinburgh in late 1761 in pamphlet form by Donaldson, pseudonymously (‘By a Gentleman of Scotland’) but prefaced by Boswell with a dedication to himself. Its fourteenth stanza praised Sheridan’s acting in the part of Hamlet.
2. braid: Scots, ‘broad’.
3. hume all night: Boswell is now embarking on a systematic campaign of careful and serious reading, beginning with David Hume’s six-volume History of England, borrowed from Dempster. Hume (1711–76), whom Boswell knew in Edinburgh, esteemed now for his achievements in philosophy, at this time enjoyed a reputation as one of the period’s pre-eminent historians.
4. my letter to her … the Royal Horse Guards Blue: The letter to which Boswell refers must be one other than the one copied into his journal for 27 December, which makes no mention of his choosing not to be far from London and wanting no regiments other than the Foot Guards or the Royal Horse Guards (‘the Blues’).
5. Marquis of Granby: John Manners (1721–70), Marquess of Granby. His late wife, Lady Frances Seymour (1728–61), was Lady Northumberland’s aunt. He was proprietary colonel of the Royal Horse Guards, and an MP (at this time for Cambridgeshire). As commander-in-chief of the British forces serving under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick in Germany, he won wide celebrity with his military achievements, especially the defeats of French forces at Wilhelmstahl and Homburg. He was now, since the Peace, on his way back to England.
6. My Lord Warkworth … continue in the Army: Warkworth, later an MP, would from 1786 be 2nd Duke of Northumberland. (‘My Lord’ is his father, Lord Northumberland.) He served in the Seven Years War as a captain in the 85th Foot (‘Royal Volunteers’), and was now lieutenant colonel in the Grenadier Guards and commander of the 111th Foot (‘broke’ – i.e. disbanded in the reductions following the Peace – in 1763). In 1764 he married Lady Anne Stuart, Bute’s third daughter. Warkworth did indeed continue in the army after his regiment disbanded, served later in the American War (1775–7), and, as Earl Percy, led the British retreat from Concord, Massachussetts, in April 1775.
7. had a Commission: That is, rise to a commission, via regular promotion, after five years’ military service in India.
1. black liveliness of behaviour: Meaning, evidently, something like ‘a swarthily lively and/or darkly humorous social manner’. (Digges is described in a contemporary account as having dark brown hair.) According to the anonymous Present State of the Stage in Great-Britain and Ireland … (1753), Digges’s ‘Mien is noble’ and ‘his Person very engaging’; he is ‘extremely genteel’, and his ‘Eye is brisk and spirited’ (p. 55).
2. Prologue: A prologue for Frances Sheridan’s comedy The Discovery, which play she wrote in the summer of 1762 when residing in Windsor, and which had now been in rehearsal at Drury Lane for about a month. Boswell keeps all mention of the request to him for a prologue out of his journal until the entry for 18 January.
3. to Sommerville about Kirk: Meaning uncertain. James Somerville (1698–1765), 12th Lord Somerville, whose courtly and polished character Boswell admired, was patron of the (officially illegal) theatre in Edinburgh. He had befriended the young Boswell, and encouraged his writing, and Boswell had dined with him on 14 November, the day before he left Edinburgh. But the reference may rather be to Thomas Somerville (1741–1830), later to have a career in the Scottish Kirk, licensed to preach in 1764, and thereafter minister of Jedburgh. (He later became a DD, a historian and a memoirist.) Like Boswell, he had studied at the University of Edinburgh, where they may have been acquainted, and from 1759 he had been tutor to the son of George Burgess (d. 1786, and, like Boswell’s great-uncle Basil Cochrane (1701–88), a Commissioner of Excise).
4. Captain Jephthson: Robert Jephson (1736–1803), Dublin-born army officer, later an MP in the Irish parliament and a playwright, at this time a lieutenant in the 90th Foot. Boswell’s acquaintance with Jephson (who was a friend of Boswell’s later friend and editor Edmond Malone (1741–1812)) was renewed, and he appears frequently in the later journals.
5. Colonel Irwin: Dublin-born Major General John (later Sir John) Irwin (1727/8–88), colonel of the 74th Foot (which was disbanded this year). He had taken part in an attack on the French coast in 1758, and served in Germany under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick in 1760. He had just (30 November) become MP for East Grinstead, Sussex, and was later a governor of Gibraltar (1765–7).
1. wrote none lately: Boswell had attempted prologues for the Edinburgh stage as early as 1757, when he was only 16. He had also written a prologue in 1759 for his distant cousin Eleanor Cathcart (1720–69), Lady Houston, whose play The Coquettes, or The Gallant in the Closet (which Boswell later described as ‘chiefly a translation of one of the bad plays of Thomas Corneille’ (European Magazine, May 1791, p. 323)) was a failure, damned on its third night. The episode led the young Boswell into an undeserved embarrassment, since his efforts, which Lady Houston requested, to protect her identity as the play’s author led many to conclude that he himself had written it.
2. conceal … in print: Perhaps, Boswell wants to suggest to Sheridan that his authorship of the prologue be concealed until the play is published.
3. Mr. Warton’s Essay on the life & writings of Pope: An Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope by Joseph Warton (1722–1800) appeared (anonymously) in 1756, and a second ‘corrected’ edition had just appeared in 1762 with the title of An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope. (That the First Citizen names him suggests that the secret of Warton’s authorship was out.) A second volume appeared much later, in 1782.
4. will not allow him to be a Poet: Warton’s Essay marked a major moment in a newer generation’s challenge to Pope’s long-standing poetical supremacy, and provoked wide debate, but the Citizen’s account is not quite accurate. Warton regarded Pope as ‘our last great poet’, contending that ‘in that species of poetry wherein Pope excelled, he is superior to all mankind: and I only say that this species of poetry is not the most excellent one of the art’ (1762 edn, p. 2, and Introduction, p. iv).
5. he had good sense … true Poetical Genius: Warton praised Pope’s ‘correct and musical versification’ and ‘strong sense’, but thought that his ‘close and constant reasoning had impaired and crushed the faculty of imagination’ (ibid., pp. 10, 98–9). Warton found supreme poetic qualities – the outcome of a ‘glowing imagination’ that inspired ‘sublime’ and ‘pathetic’ (i.e. emotional) productions – in the works of Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton (ibid., Introduction, pp. xi–xiii). Warton thought Pope had ‘displayed more imagination’ in The Rape of the Lock ‘than in all his other works together’ (ibid., p. 246).
6. Longinus: Traditionally held to be the author of the influential Greek treatise ‘On the Sublime’ (first century ad). Longinus is mentioned many times in the Essay, but Warton actually refers to a method suggested by Horace in his Satires (I, iv) (ibid., Introduction, pp. vii – viii).
7. Thomson … force too: Warton praised Thomson’s The Seasons, noting his ‘powerful talents’, his ‘strong and copious fancy’ and his ‘wild and romantic scenes’. But among Thomson’s faults are a diction ‘sometimes harsh and inharmonious, and sometimes turgid and obscure’ (ibid., p. 42). (For these and Warton’s several other references to Thomson, ibid., pp. 46, 138, 146–7.)
8. old cloaths: Probably the clothes Boswell took to his tailor, Dun (mentioned in the memorandum for 29 December).
9. Nidderys Wynd address: That is, the general style and tone of Edinburgh social manners. Musical concerts were held in St Mary’s Chapel, in Niddry’s Wynd (which ran from the High Street to the Cowgate), sponsored by the Musical Society of Edinburgh, until 1762.
1. King’s Chapel: The Chapel Royal, in Whitehall. Boswell plans to go to services this morning because leaving at 3 p.m. for his assignation with ‘Louisa’ means that he cannot go to church at his more usual times. But (as the journal entry shows) he does not get there.
2. Hume at 10: Meet George Home (whose surname was pronounced ‘Hume’) at 10.
3. all giddiness at his father’s: Boswell’s journals for 1761–2 note visits to the Kames household in Edinburgh. He had also been at Kames House, in Berwickshire, for a good part of October 1762, and recorded many details of his time there in his Harvest Jaunt journal. His ‘giddiness’ is the more explicable if F. A. Pottle’s deductions are correct that he was having a clandestine sexual affair (from the winter of 1761–2) with Home’s younger married sister, Jean (Home) Heron (Earlier Years, pp. 77–9).
4. Covent-Garden Church: St Paul’s Church (designed by Inigo Jones), the parish church of Covent Garden.
1. Bagnio: A public bathhouse. Such places were often used for sexual trysts. In a letter of 9 December 1762, Digges listed some of the public pleasures available to Boswell in London, and mentioned ‘the more private Yet More delightful disipations of A Bagnio’ (Corr. 9, p. 331).
2. Webster … Gould’s: Webster, like Boswell, was Mrs. Gould’s first cousin once removed.
3. Mrs. Douglas … of the Guards: Mrs Douglas (formerly Miss Mackay) was the wife of Captain James Douglas, who was commissioned in the 3rd Foot Guards (Gould’s regiment) in 1758. Next month he would be appointed Quartermaster General to the forces serving in Portugal, at the rank of lieutenant colonel of Foot.
4. Mr. Joseph Fergusson then my tutor: Joseph Fergusson (1718–91) succeeded the Rev. John Dun, whom Boswell liked much better, as his boyhood tutor when Dun was ordained to Auchinleck parish in 1752, and had accompanied him on the first of his two visits to Moffat. He continued as tutor to Boswell’s younger brothers when Boswell entered the University of Edinburgh in the autumn of 1753. In 1761 he was ordained minister of Tundergarth parish (where John Johnston was a parishioner).
1. Tuesday 4 January: No memoranda survive for 4–27 January (again perhaps victims of family censorship)
2. Mr. Meighan: Thomas Meighan the younger (d. 1774), who carried on the business in Drury Lane founded by his father, Thomas Meighan (d. 1753).
3. freinds: In this sense, family and connections.
4. slave to the Plantations: If so, probably as an indentured servant. This kind of labour was common in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, mostly for the owners of tobacco plantations.
5. lighters: Presumably some kind of cargo vessels are meant. The more usual sense of lighter is a ‘flat-bottomed barge, used in lightening or unloading (sometimes loading) ships that cannot be discharged (or loaded) at a wharf, etc., and for transporting goods of any kind, usually in a harbour’ (OED).
6. The King of Prussia … every vice: ‘If free, despis’d; if ceremonious, nice; / But gallantry comprises ev’ry vice.’ Boswell doubtless knew these lines from a ‘Translation of an epistle of the Œuvres du Philosophe de Sans Souci … wrote by the King of Prussia [Frederick II (1712–86)]. Epistle XIX’, which appeared in Donaldson’s Collection I.
7. In Scotland … with a vengeance: Boswell refers to the ‘consensual’ form of marriage (based on a consensual copula), one of the forms defined in Scottish law at this time.
1. my brother John … terrible way: John Boswell (1743–c.1798) had attended the University of Glasgow in 1758, joined the 30th Regiment of Foot as an ensign in 1760, and in December of this year would be commissioned lieutenant in the 21st Regiment of Foot. He had been ‘confined by a severe disorder’ (Corr. 1, p. 44) this winter, and was to be troubled by mental instability intermittently for the rest of his life. Lord Auchinleck, in a letter to Boswell of 13 January, said that he had written fully to Pringle about John’s condition, and asked Boswell to talk to Pringle about him.
2. card: For Eglinton’s reply (not transcribed by Boswell into his journal) to Boswell’s note of 21 or 22 December, see Appendix II.
3. Mr. Moody … the likeness o’ a Cat: Alexander Moodie (1728–99), a well-known Calvinist clergyman in Ayrshire, minister of Riccarton parish from 1762. He is mentioned several times in the poems of Boswell’s near-contemporary and fellow Ayrshireman Robert Burns (1759–96), and in Burns’s The Holy Fair (1785) Moodie’s powerful preaching is such that the mere sight of his face would frighten the Devil himself back to hell. If the ‘likeness o’ a Cat’ has a precise referent, it has not been traced.
4. (as Falstaff says) … clever: ‘I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men’ (2 Henry IV I.ii.10).
5. an Ode: Probably Boswell’s unpublished Ode on Ambition, a title he listed in the ‘Plan’ prefixed to the manuscript collection of his poems (now in the Bodleian Library, Douce 193) as a poem of 48 lines. No copy of it has been recovered.
6. Mr. Moody’s Elders … the chosen ones: The elders of a Church of Scotland congregation were the lay representatives to the congregational assembly, which the minister moderated. Eglinton’s tone here suggests his libertinistic scepticism about the Elect (or ‘chosen ones’) of the Calvinist Scottish Kirk’s structure.
7. Lord Advocate: Thomas (later Sir Thomas) Miller (1717–89), of Barskimming (and later of Glenlee), Lord Advocate of Scotland (roughly equivalent to Attorney General in England) since 1760, and later Lord Justice-Clerk and Lord President of the Court of Session. He was in London as MP for Dumfries Burghs.
8. Captain Johnston … son to Sir James: Captain George Johnstone RN (1730–87) had served in the War of the Austrian Succession, and was soon to be appointed by Bute as governor of West Florida. His father, Sir James Johnstone (1697–1772), 3rd Baronet of Westerhall, Dumfries, had been MP for Dumfries Burghs 1743–54. His mother, Barbara Murray (d. 1773), was a sister of Lord Elibank.
9. Banks of Scotland: Eglinton, as one of the ‘improving’ Scottish Lowland landowners of the period, was much concerned with modern banking. He may have been the author of An Inquiry into the Original and Consequence of the Public Debt, ‘By a Person of Distinction’ (Edinburgh 1753; London 1754) (though it has also been attributed to Elibank), and he would prove influential in the passing of a parliamentary act in 1765 on Scottish banks’ dealing in paper credit.
10. burn ships … burning glasses: The great mathematician Archimedes, according to a claim made by some ancient authors, destroyed the Roman fleet under Claudius Marcellus at the siege of Syracuse (214–212 bc) by burning the vessels at a bow shot’s distance, using sunlight reflected and intensified by a system of mirrors. The claim, as well as whether such a tactic were feasible, was much debated at this time (of war and naval engagements). The Royal Society had discussed the experiments in this regard of the seventeenth-century German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (?1601/2–80), and of the eighteenth-century French naturalist Georges-Louis le Clerc, comte de Buffon (1707–88), who experimented successfully with igniting wood from a distance by using mirrors. Papers on the subject were published in the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions as recently as the 1750s.
11. George Selwyn: Selwyn (1719–91), MP (at this time for Gloucester), though a generally inactive one, with several lucrative sinecures (at this time he was paymaster of the Board of Works), was widely known for his mordant, irreverent and frequently macabre wit, which he delivered with a famously deadpan demeanour. Boswell records in ‘Boswelliana’ two of his witticisms, one each reported to him by Erskine and Lady Betty.
12. reverend Bishop … controversial divinity: This tormented bishop and Selwyn’s teasing faux-religious correspondence with him do not turn up in the published biographies of Selwyn, and the anecdote Boswell heard here (he gives no source) has not been corroborated. Perhaps intended is Selwyn’s friend and correspondent Charles Lyttleton (1714–68), who like Selwyn had attended Eton, and who at the time of Selwyn’s Oxford years gave up the law for a career in the Church. He was ordained in 1742, and became bishop of Carlisle in 1762.
13. Communion before Confirmation: In the sequence of the seven sacraments in the Catholic Church at this time, confirmation was the second sacrament (the ceremony for which involves anointing with chrism by a bishop) and preceded the third, the receiving of the first Holy Communion. (In modern practice the sequence varies, and remains at this time a matter of discussion within the Church.) Selwyn (in the anecdote Boswell heard) would have been alluding irreverently to contemporary doctrinal debates concerning valid reception of the sacraments (especially of the Eucharist, to receive which while not in a state of grace would be sacrilege).
14. expelled … my blood &c: Selwyn was expelled from Hertford College, Oxford, on 29 July 1745 for a mocking parody of the sacrament of Holy Communion (the Eucharist) at a drinking party in the preceding May. But the depositions and official university accounts make no mention of a dog, or of an actual cutting of an arm, reporting rather that Selwyn poured wine into a cup or chalice from a bottle under his arm, and feigned a flow of blood (S. P. Kerr, George Selwyn and the Wits (London: Methuen, 1909), pp. 37–43). Selwyn claimed later, in defence of himself, that his ridicule had been directed at the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.
15. purse-proud: ‘Proud or arrogant on account of one’s wealth; (also) having an inflated regard for wealth’ (OED).
16. last year: Eglinton and Boswell are plainly jesting, and preserving Boswell’s anonymity. The ‘which was my ode to ambition’ of the preceding sentence is Boswell’s parenthetical addition (i.e. these words, referring to Boswell, were not said by Eglinton when he produced the poem).
17. une Similé avec une longue queue: French has no word similé. The word used was probably similitude. Une comparaison is used in more modern French.
1. Twelfth-day: The feast of the Epiphany (commemorating the manifestation of the new-born Christ to the Gentiles, in the persons of the Magi) – the twelfth day after Christmas, not marked with celebration by the Church of Scotland. The celebration of the Epiphany was the closing festivity of the Christmas holiday season.
2. twelfth cake: A cake, sugared and frosted, often eaten at a social feast or party with a bean or a coin in it, the finder of which became the ruler (queen or king) of the feast.
3. the Exchange: The Royal Exchange, at Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, the second building of the name, built in 1669 to replace the original, lost in the Great Fire of 1666.
1. My Grandfather: James Boswell (1672–1749), 7th Laird of Auchinleck, a successful advocate in Edinburgh. A melancholy and troubled man, with whom (in that regard) Boswell felt an affinity, and much valued by Boswell for his restoration and expansion of the Auchinleck estate.
1. Scotch Seceder … this subject: Seceders were a breakaway group of ministers and their congregations who split (on doctrinal grounds and on the infringement of popular rights following the Patronage Act of 1712) from the established Church of Scotland in 1732–3, later forming themselves into an Associate Synod. These Seceders split again in 1747 into two groups, the General Associate Synod (or Anti-Burgher) and Associate Synod (Burgher), over the question of the Burgess Oath (required in cities and large towns of those who wished to become burgesses). These disputes were still current: a secession congregation was forming in Auchinleck parish only this year, and another secession, the Relief (i.e. from lay patronage), had come as recently as 1761. The English Methodists were founded by John Wesley (1702–91) and Charles Wesley within the Church of England, originally with members of their group that came to be called the Holy Club at Oxford in 1729. This group too divided, in 1741, with the Calvinist Methodists, led by George Whitefield (1714–70) – originally with the Wesleys in the Holy Club – adhering to the Calvinist doctrines of election and damnation, while John Wesley stressed the role of free will in the attainment of salvation through Christ. Boswell alludes here in general to the intensity of theological and doctrinal disputation among the Churches of the time, especially on the matter of ‘good works’ (of the kind he has just here tried to perform) versus faith and grace as the means to salvation, and attempts to explain the events of an individual existence as not random but directed by a particular Providence.
2. Mrs. Douglas: The former Miss Mackay.
3. a Buck: ‘A gay, dashing fellow; a dandy, fop, “fast” man’ (OED).
4. a Fable of Gay’s: Gay’s popular Fables had appeared in a first series in 1727, and in a second, posthumously, in 1738 (their publication arranged by Queensberry).
5. a Grandmother: Margaret (Hawkison) Cochrane, widow of General James Cochrane, had succeeded to the estates of Ochiltree and Culross on the death of Cochrane’s brother in 1752.
6. the grave triflers: From Churchill’s poem The Apology (1761), written in reaction to the article in the Critical Review which had attacked his Rosciad.
7. a certain Lord … out of the room: A later version of this anecdote in the Town and Country Magazine’s notorious gossipy and scandal-mongering ‘Tête-à-Tête’ section (Dec. 1777, pp. 625–6) names the jilted man not as a ‘Lord’ but as the Abate Antonio Grossatesta (d. 1761), Italian diplomat, who had been Modenese emissary to England for several terms between 1742 and 1752.
1. St. Martin’s church: The church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, in what is now Trafalgar Square. An older church on the site survived the Great Fire, but was replaced by one designed by James Gibbs (1682–1754), and opened in 1726.
2. Mr. Sumner Master of Harrow School: Robert Carey Sumner (from 1768, DD) (1729–71), an innovative and successful master of Harrow from 1760 until his death.
3. my yoke is easy: ‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light’ (Matthew 11:28–30).
4. Mr. Crawfurd … Errol in Fife: The wealthy Patrick (known as ‘Peter’) Craufurd (c.1704–78) of Auchenames (in Renfrewshire), and Crosbie and Drumsoy (in Ayrshire), was at this time MP for Renfrewshire (1761–68), previously for Ayrshire (1741–54). To his inherited properties he added a life interest in Errol, the estate in Fife of his first wife, Elizabeth Middleton (d. 1746). A close political follower of Bute.
5. Lord Rothes’s estate: John Leslie (c.1698–1767), 10th Earl of Rothes, colonel of the 3rd Foot Guards, and another of the Scots representative peers. He had had a distinguished military career, and from 1758 was commander-in-chief in Ireland. The estate to which Boswell refers was in Fife.
6. Mr. Dun, Mr. Fergusson, Mr. Mcquhae and Mr. Gordon: The sequence of boyhood tutors in Edinburgh to Boswell and his brothers. Mr Gordon (not identified with certainty, but probably a young trainee clergyman) was now tutoring David Boswell, and would do so until David began his banking apprenticeship in March.
1. a fair way of recovery: Granby had been dangerously ill with a typhus fever at Warburg in the latter part of 1762. He would return to England on 6 February.
2. a Gentleman presented … the Guards: That is, presented at court. Lady Northumberland probably refers to Campbell Scott (c.1747–66), younger brother of Henry Scott (1746–1812), 3rd Duke of Buccleuch (and later 5th Duke of Queensberry). He was a stepson of Charles Townshend, the former Secretary at War, who had married Scott’s mother, the widowed Lady Caroline (Campbell) Scott (1717–94), in 1755. He was commissioned ensign this month in the 3rd Foot Guards.
3. old notions about familys: Boswell’s boyhood ‘Commonplace Book’, kept when he was about 10 years old and now in the Folger Shakespeare Library, has among other things the crests and mottos of established and noble families pasted in.
4. The Peircy … made he: The opening lines of The Ballad of Chevy Chase. A manuscript copy of this ballad, in Boswell’s youthful hand and now in the Hyde Collection, Houghton Library, is headed ‘The Original Ballad of Chevy Chase, From a Manuscript in the Posession of The Right Honourable The Countess of Northumberland’.
5. a Brother of General Crawfurd’s: Patrick Craufurd’s brother, Colonel John Craufurd (c.1725–64), was at this time MP for Berwick-upon-Tweed, and colonel of the 85th Foot (‘Royal Volunteers’) with the army rank of brigadier general.
6. gets the proffits … sold: Proprietary colonels of regiments at this time indeed profited from the purchases of commissions.
7. to Court: To public levees, at St James’s Palace.
8. present you to the Queen: Lord Northumberland was Lord Chamberlain to the Queen.
9. house in the Country finished: Lord Auchinleck had recently had a new Adam-style mansion house built at Auchinleck to replace the antiquated sixteenth-century tower house that had long been the family residence, and it was occupied from late 1762. Lady Northumberland visited the estate in 1760. Her account of the house in her own diary was less than complimentary, terming it ‘but a middling House’, though she found the estate and setting attractive – ‘justly it is a romantick spot’ (16 Aug. 1760: The Diaries of a Duchess: Extracts from the Diaries of the First Duchess of Northumberland (1716–1776), ed. James Greig (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1926), p. 25). Auchinleck House fell derelict in the late twentieth century. It was restored, and opened as a self-catering holiday let in 2000.
10. the old Castle: The ruins of an ancient Norman keep, residence of the original Auchinlecks of Auchinleck, high on a cliff at the junction of the Dippol Burn and Lugar Water on the Auchinleck estate. Lady Northumberland had written in her diary, ‘The River Lugar runs between immense Rocks with the tallest finest Firrs immaginable, a Walk by the Side wch. terminates in a vast perpendicular Rock with a narrow steep path winding round it, & on the top hid in Trees is an old Castle. This is so retired a spot that I should imagine people might abide there forever witht. being discover’d & the narrowness & steepness of the Path makes it almost inaccessible’ (ibid., p. 25).
11. Faucit: John Fawcett the elder (d. 1793), actor and singer, who had been a pupil of Thomas Arne. He debuted at Drury Lane in 1760, and played mostly supporting or minor parts.
12. Second part of King Henry IV … tears from my eyes: The play had opened this season on 3 November, and Garrick’s Henry IV and Love’s Falstaff were much admired in the reviews. In Act IV, sc. v, the dying King Henry IV forgives, and relinquishes his rule to, his son, the formerly roistering young Prince Hal (who ends the play as King Henry V).
1. the Paphian Queen: Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love (called so because of the legend that she landed at Paphos, on the island of Cyprus, when she emerged from the sea).
2. Mr. Barry … self-same way: Spranger Barry (1719–77), Irish actor, began his career in Dublin, and had acted with Sheridan at Smock Alley. His first role was Othello, a part in which he continued to be applauded and in which he was generally seen as superior to Garrick (with whom he was often throughout his career in competition). Castalio is a character in The Orphan: or, The Unhappy Marriage, a tragedy by Thomas Otway (1652–85), first produced in 1680 and (like his Venice Preserv’d) long popular on the eighteenth-century stage. The role was the first of the ‘romantic lover’ parts for which the handsome Barry was admired.
3. Go chide him hither: ‘Find him, my Lord of Warwick, chide him hither’ (2 Henry IV IV.v.62).
4. a terrible Joy: ‘Joy’, a common term of endearment among the Irish, had come to be used as a general term (sometimes derisive) for an Irish person.
5. Miss Mowat: Miss Mowat, said by the London Chronicle (11 Oct. 1760) to be the ‘daughter of Mr Mowat, Grocer, in Bond-street’, acted at Covent Garden in March 1760, appearing in The Spirit of Contradiction, afterpiece to A Jovial Crew (for which see n. 7 for 13 January), during the time of Boswell’s first London escapade, then at Drury Lane, where she appeared with Sheridan several times in the 1761 season (including the part of Desdemona to his Othello on 30 April) but disappeared from the London stage thereafter.
6. Ceres and Bachus: Ceres, Roman goddess of agriculture and grain; Bacchus, god of wine. Boswell echoes a well-known line from Act IV sc. v of Terence’s comedy Eunuchus (which he saw on 1 December): ‘Sine Cerere et Libero [i.e. Bacchus] friget Venus’ – ‘Without Ceres [bread] and Bacchus [wine], Venus is cold’ (i.e. love is impossible without food and drink). This had become a topos in art (especially of the Dutch seventeenth century).
7. a seal … extinguishes it: A pattern for the device to impress a design into the sealing wax for letters. Cupid was the Roman god of erotic love, and Hymen the Greek god of marriage and weddings, often depicted with a wedding-feast torch in his hand.
8. St. Brides church … hard by: St Bride’s (St Bridget’s), one of the largest of the churches designed by Wren after the Great Fire, with the tallest of Wren’s steeples, on the south side of Fleet Street, a short distance east and within easy earshot of the Black Lion inn.
9. caused make: Asked to have made.
10. imbecillity: Weakness, infirmity (rather than its more modern sense of ‘idiocy’).
1. Captain Plume … Body: ‘[T]he best security for a woman’s soul is her body’ (The Recruiting Officer, IV.i).
2. his house: Garrick’s London residence, which he used during the Drury Lane season, was at 27 Southampton Street, near the Strand, a few minutes’ walk from the theatre.
3. in the house of Lords: Probably on 25 November, when Boswell went at Eglinton’s invitation and heard the King’s Speech.
4. Mrs. Garrick: Eva Maria Veigel (1724–1822), born in Vienna, and an accomplished and celebrated dancer using the stage name Violette (the French translation of her surname). She joined the Italian Opera Company at the King’s Theatre in London in 1746. She and Garrick married in 1749.
5. Mr. Zophani: Johann Zoffany (1733–1810), German-born painter, had arrived in England in 1761, and won Garrick’s patronage.
6. Johnston’s (the Boxkeeper): Alexander Johnston (d. 1775), box bookkeeper at Drury Lane.
7. the Jovial Crew: A Jovial Crew, another of Boswell’s favourite plays (which he had seen earlier and several of whose songs he had memorized), was a revived adaptation of the comedy by Richard Brome (c.1590–1652), first performed in 1641, and said to be the last play acted in London before the suppression of the theatres under Cromwell. It was revived many times after the Restoration, spawned many imitations, and was altered into a comic opera (as part of the vogue caused by the success of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera) by Edward Roome (d. 1729), Sir William Yonge (c.1693–1755) and Mathew Concanen (1701–49), opening at Drury Lane in 1731. Covent Garden revived this comic opera version, The Jovial Crew, or The Merry Beggars, with music arranged by William Bates, in February 1760, and it was running at the time of Boswell’s first London escapade. It proved a huge popular success, was thereafter performed several times yearly, and held the stage for some fifteen years. This season the chief part, Hearty, was played by Beard (whom Boswell had met at the Bedford Coffee House before joining him and other members at the meeting of the Beefsteak Club on 27 November).
8. a bathcake: A Bath cake, a sweet round cake, baked to various recipes, but usually made with butter, flour and cream, and containing and topped with caraway comfits.
1. Lady Mirabel: Boswell leaves no clue to this flirtatious widow’s identity. His code name for her (like ‘Louisa’) is doubtless drawn from the theatre. A female character of the name appears in Cibber’s The Rival Fools (1709) and in the early-seventeenth-century play on which it is based, Wit at Several Weapons (probably by Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) and William Rowley (?1585–1626)). The best-known character of the name is Mirabel, the main male role in The Way of the World (1700) by William Congreve (1670–1729).
2. his Cousin Erskine should have a company: Andrew Erskine’s regiment was soon to be disbanded. ‘Have a company’ means win promotion to a captaincy. The term ‘cousin’ is semi-jocular, as these two Erskines were only remotely related.
3. Erskine: Andrew Erskine.
1. New Church in the Strand: St Mary le Strand, designed by Gibbs and built 1714–17, was the first of the new churches after the Great Fire.
2. se’nnight: Week (i.e. seven nights).
3. Journal Amoreux: Probably Le Journal amoureux (1669–70), one of the late-seventeenth-century French ‘nouvelles galantes’ by the novelist and playwright Mme (Marie-Cathérine) de Villedieu (1640–83).
1. driven from Britain: James II (1633–1701), descendant of the Scottish Stuart monarchs, Catholic brother and successor of Charles II, was deposed in 1688, and fled to France. He and his descendants lived thereafter on the Continent. His attempt to win back the throne failed with the defeat of his forces at the Battle of the Boyne in Ireland in 1690. The Bill of Rights, enacted by the English parliament in 1689, declared James II to have abdicated. This Bill, and the Act of Settlement of 1701, permanently barred Roman Catholics from the throne. Jacobite uprisings, the two most significant coming in 1715 and 1745, had sought to bring to the throne his son – by his Catholic second wife, Mary of Modena (1658–1718) – James Francis Edward Stuart (1688–1766) (the ‘Old Pretender’), and then his grandson Charles Edward Stuart (1720–88) (‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’, the ‘Young Pretender’), but were defeated. Government reprisals in Scotland after the decisive defeat of the Jacobite forces in the Battle of Culloden in 1746 had been ruthlessly severe.
2. King William … did: William III (1650–1702), Prince of Orange (in the Netherlands), was brought to the English throne in 1689, and ruled jointly with Queen Mary II (1662–94) – his wife and cousin, daughter of James II and his first wife, Lady Anne Hyde (1638–71) – and then alone after her death. He encouraged the Act of Toleration of 1689, guaranteeing toleration to certain Protestant Nonconformists.
3. the Revolution: Boswell presumably means the Revolution of 1688, called the ‘Glorious’ Revolution (or ‘Bloodless’ Revolution, despite heavy fighting and loss of life), at which William and Mary assumed the throne in succession to James II. The Act of Settlement of 1701, which changed the laws of inheritance of the English throne, settled the succession on the Electress Sophia (1630–1714) of Hanover (a granddaughter of King James I of England and VI of Scotland) and her Protestant heirs.
4. the German war … a German sovereign: The Seven Years War began in the reign of George II (1683–1760), who was also Elector of Hanover, in Germany, and whose father, George I (1660–1727), son of the Electress Sophia, had come to the British throne from Hanover after the death of Queen Anne (1665–1714) without a direct heir (all her children having predeceased her). George III (George II’s grandson) was the first of the Hanoverian line to be British-born and English- rather than German-speaking.
1. as the Gascoon … Mr. Horace: Camille d’Hostun (1652–1728), French diplomat and military commander (who among his other dignities was comte de Tallard), was field commander in the War of the Spanish Succession. The general source of Eglinton’s quip may be Gasconia, ou recueil des bons mots … et des rencontres les plus vives des Gascons (1708), which demonstrated the wit and humour of the people of Gascony. The jest here between Boswell and Eglinton (who have been, over the course of Boswell’s London visit, stepping around each other on issues of punctilio and personal dignity) concerns the comical absurdity of using honorifics such as ‘Mr’ before the name of a poet.
2. the Ladies celestial: The Muses.
3. wait of: ‘To pay a respectful visit to’ (OED); ‘call on, pay one’s respects to, attend (the summons of)’ (Concise Scottish Dictionary).
4. Scottish Magnificence … again: In a letter to Johnston of 13 September 1762, Boswell reported his excitement on reading for the first time William Robertson’s History of Scotland (1759), ‘which has carried me back in Imagination to the ancient days of Scottish Grandeur; has filled my mind with generous ideas of the valour of our Ancestors, and made me feel a pleasing sympathy for the beautiful accomplished Mary [Queen of Scots]’ (Corr. 1, p.15). Mary (Stuart) (1542–87), Catholic daughter of James V (1512–42) of Scotland and Mary of Guise (1515–60), ruled Scotland from 1561, was forced to abdicate in 1567, and, accused of plots with English and other Catholics against Elizabeth I of England, was beheaded in 1587. See also the journal for 24 February and n. 6. For Robertson, see 2 July, n. 5.
5. bring up … sons: That is, to London. Her youngest sons were Alexander (c.1745–90), who would succeed Sir James as baronet in 1766, and Archibald (1747–1826), now at Westminster School, later a lawyer, MP and Sir Alexander’s successor as baronet. He became Solicitor General (1784–88), Attorney General (1788–93) and eventually Lord Chief Baron of Exchequer (1793–1813). Sir Alexander Macdonald would later take famously bitter offence at the way he was depicted by Boswell, whom he hosted on his visit with Johnson to Skye in 1773, in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (first edn 1785), leaving Boswell in fear of being called out by him in a duel.
6. like the Game: Ready for ‘amorous sport or play’ (OED).
7. the nicest art: The finest artifice (concealment, dissembling).
8. Mrs. Sheridan’s … thought: Frances Sheridan’s twentieth-century editors concede that her ‘own prologue … is obviously little more than a revision of the longer of her young friend’s two pieces; it borrows its main ideas directly from Boswell and shamelessly steals one of his couplets … almost verbatim, adding only a certain polish and shapeliness to the whole. It is surprising that Boswell did not anywhere comment on these plagiarisms, incensed and hurt as he was by the sharp tones of Thomas Sheridan’s repudiation of his verses’ (The Plays of Frances Sheridan, ed. Robert Hogan and Jerry C. Beasley (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1984), Appendix, p. 202; Boswell’s two prologues appear at pp. 202–4).
9. mediocris Poeta: A mediocre poet (adapted from Horace’s Ars Poetica II, 372–3).
10. presumptous: Boswell’s usual spelling of ‘presumptuous’, probably reflecting his pronunciation. He generally omits the ‘u’ in this way in words spelled similarly.
1. Elvira’s being acted … damning it: Mallet’s play, which Garrick was eager to have succeed, featured an impressive cast, with the main parts being acted by Susanna Maria (Arne) Cibber (1714–66) as Elvira, Hannah Pritchard (the Queen), Garrick himself (Don Alonzo), Charles Holland (1733–69) (Don Pedro), and Love (Don Alvarez). Attempts to disrupt or damn plays were not uncommon among audiences of the time. Disturbances at this play had been expected because of Mallet’s Scottish origins, Bute’s unpopularity, and the play’s supposedly pro-Bute references to the Peace. The North Briton of 20 January (no. 34), in the course of an attack on Bute, would quote lines from Elvira, which it provocatively referred to as ‘the political poem of ELVIRA, now acting at Drury-Lane theatre’. Bute this year awarded Mallet the post of Inspector of Exchequer-Book in the Outports of London, a sinecure worth £300 a year (which Mallet would collect for the rest of his life).
2. the Spectator observes … & in manners: ‘When I consider this great City in its several Quarters and Divisions, I look upon it as an aggregate of various nations distinguished from each other by their respective Customs, Manners and Interests. The Courts of two Countries do not so much differ from one another, as the Court and City in their peculiar Ways of Life and Conversation’ (Addison, Spectator 403, 12 June 1712).
3. Somerset Coffeehouse: In the Strand, next to St Mary le Strand.
4. the top of London Bridge … each other: A clear view of the Thames from the medieval stone London Bridge was, in early 1763, actually a novelty. Houses, shops, a chapel and other structures, some as high as seven storeys, had occupied the edges of London Bridge and were demolished, among efforts to relieve congestion and structural decay, from 1758 to 1762. On 13 January the Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser reported that ‘There has been near a hundred thousand pounds already expended in the repairs of London-bridge’ and ‘it is greatly feared’ that ‘it will require a farther large sum of money to compleat the improvements of the said bridge.’ Newspapers of this winter refer many times to its particular severity, and to the amount of ice in the Thames.
5. Whitechapel: Whitechapel, originally in Stepney, developed as a London suburb because of its position along the main route into and out of the City from Essex. ‘The Great Essex Road led from Aldgate to Whitechapel and Mile End Old Town and then eastwards to Stratford, Colchester and Harwich. This was a very busy and crowded thoroughfare with stage-coaches and wagons competing for space with horsemen and walkers’ (Derek Morris, Mile End Old Town 1740–1780: A Social History of an Early Modern London Suburb (London: East London History Society, 2002), p. 15).
6. neat houses upon the road: This portion of the road had seen much mid-century redevelopment. ‘It was … along this road that the important merchants and rich widows built their imposing houses and neat villas, remarked upon by Boswell … [A] traveller … would have been impressed by the two miles of development that stretched from the Plough Tavern, close to the present day Queen Mary [College], University of London, to Aldgate’ (ibid, p. 3). ‘Malplaquet House … built in 1741 … is typical of the houses with rack rents of £50 and with the adjoining houses, which had rack rents of £30, could well have been referred to by Boswell, when he wrote of the neat houses along the Mile End Road’ (ibid., p. 15).
7. John Bull: Fictional epitome of the ‘typical’ Englishman. Initially the creation of Dr John Arbuthnot (1667–1735) in the five-part The History of John Bull (1712), written at the time of the War of the Spanish Succession, the figure emerged with renewed propagandistic popularity among caricaturists in the 1760s (i.e. during the Seven Years War). Arbuthnot, author and physician (from 1705 physician to Queen Anne), was a friend and literary collaborator of Swift, Pope and Gay, and a member with them of the satirical Scriblerus Club.
8. Roast Beef: Air XLV from Act III, sc. ii, of Fielding’s Walpole-era political burlesque The Grub-Street Opera (a revised and suppressed version of the play first produced as The Welsh Opera in 1731), with words later adapted by the London theatre musician Richard Leveridge (1670–1758) to the tune of the anonymous ‘The King’s Old Courtier’. Much used as an English patriotic song (its fuller title being ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’), it would have had particular significance on this night given Mallet’s Scottish origins, and the unpopularity of Bute.
9. Præses & Clerk, at an election in a Scotch County: The ‘præses’ was the man chosen as chairman at a county election meeting.
10. disposed to let it pass: That the trio’s plot to disrupt the play failed is confirmed by another diary account of this night, by Mallet’s friend Edward Gibbon (1737–94) (later the author of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), who attended the play with his father, Mallet and some thirty other friends. They ‘went … into the Pitt … to silence all opposition. However we had no occasion to exert ourselves … we heard nothing but applause’ (Gibbon’s Journal …, ed. D. M. Low (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), pp. 202–3).
11. the Multitude … painted: Shakespeare, Coriolanus: to ‘make a monster of the multitude’ (II.iii.11), and the ‘many-headed multitude’ (II.iii.17). Pope wrote, ‘There still remains to mortify a Wit / The many-headed Monster of the Pit’ (The Second Book of Horace Imitated, Ep. I, 304–5).
12. a joint Sixpenny cut: A collectively authored inexpensive pamphlet, or perhaps engraving.