1. a gleet: Medical term, now rare or obsolete, for a morbid discharge, in this case specifically from the urethra.
2. Congreve the Poet … accept of: William Congreve, poet and playwright, whose Love for Love (1695) and The Way of the World (which today remains his best-known play) continued popular on the eighteenth-century stage. Francis Godolphin (1678–1766), 2nd Earl of Godolphin, held various court and political appointments in the first half of the century and became Lord Privy Seal. His wife, Henrietta Churchill (1681–1733), was from 1722 2nd Duchess of Marlborough. He indeed apparently tolerated Lady Godolphin’s affair with Congreve, and raised their daughter, Mary (c.1723–64), as his own.
3. image of him in wax … himself: Published rumours circulated soon after Congreve’s death that Lady Godolphin had a wax image of him made (not an uncommon practice at the time among the bereaved): ‘We hear that the Effigies [sic] of the late Wm. Congreve, Esq; has been curiously done in Waxwork at the expense of 200 l’ (London Evening Post, 9 June, 1730); ‘We hear that the Effigies of the late Ingenious William Congreve, Esq; done in Waxwork, at the Expence of 200 l. and which was kept at a Person of Quality’s House in St. James’s, was last Week broke to pieces by the Carelessness of a Servant in bringing it down Stairs last Monday Night; to the unspeakable Grief of that Noble Family’ (Fog’s Weekly Journal, 22 July 1732). But, as here, the stories were often embellished and exaggerated.
4. Dutchess of Leeds: Lady Mary married Thomas Osborne (1713–89), 4th Duke of Leeds, in 1740. But Mrs Douglas’s claim that she was raised tenderly and never allowed to see the moon has not been corroborated.
5. draught on my arrears: Boswell’s joke is that he is not offering Douglas a ‘note’ (a promise to pay) but asks Douglas to draw on funds ‘in arrears’, i.e. that are deficient, or that do not actually exist.
6. the civil list: Under George III, after the Civil List Act of 1762, the funds appropriated annually by Parliament to cover the expenses of the sovereign’s household and state duties became a source of reward for supporters in Parliament with pensions and other payments.
7. as Sir Francis Wronghead says: Wronghead is a character in The Provok’d Husband, or, A Journey to London (1728) by Colley Cibber, a revision and completion of an earlier fragment, A Journey to London, by Sir John Vanburgh (1664–1726). Boswell may have encountered the play in May 1760, when it ran at Covent Garden. It had also just played at Covent Garden on 16 November and 28 December of the present season, and had played in Edinburgh in June 1759 (with James Love in the role of Wronghead), in January 1760, and in May and September of 1762. With this allusion, Boswell genially parodies his own circumstances. The impecunious country gentleman Sir Francis Wronghead of Bumper Hall, a new Parliament-man for the borough of Guzzledown, naively came to London to ‘court to some of the great men’ (IV.204–5); at Westminster, he artlessly ‘went straight forward, to one great man I had never seen in my life before’ (IV.207–8), and told him directly that ‘as I desire to serve my King, as well as my country, I shall be very willing to accept of a place at court’ (IV.237–9). Asked by the lord what sort of place he had in mind, he replied that any place ‘about a thousand a year, will be well enough to be doing with till something better falls in’ (IV.250–52). The lord responds with empty politeness, but no more.
8. not be discovered: ‘Louisa’s’ real name never appears in Boswell’s journal, and on the evidence of surviving documents Boswell did not disclose her identity to any of his friends.
9. dissembling Whore: Not in modern medical opinions. While ‘reinfection is far more probable than a recrudescence’ of Boswell’s two earlier infections of 1760, ‘Louisa’ was sincere in her protests, since, though she admitted to having been infected three years earlier, ‘gonorrhea may lurk latent and asymptomatic in women as a low-grade endocervicitis’ (William B. Ober, Boswell’s Clap and Other Essays: Medical Analyses of Literary Men’s Afflictions (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979), pp. 7–8). She ‘could honestly assure [Boswell] that she was free of all signs of infection yet still conceal, unknown to herself, gonococci in the glandular crypts of the uterine cervix and Bartholin’s glands which could infect an unprotected partner’ (D. W. Purdie and Neil Gow, ‘The Maladies of James Boswell, Advocate’, Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh 32, 3 (2002), p. 199).
10. un Etourdie: Correctly, un étourdi (a flighty fellow, a scatterbrain).
11. for some weeks after: ‘Douglas’s treatment consisted chiefly of having Boswell keep to his room, rest, take a low calorie diet, electuaries to keep his bowels free, medications not otherwise described, and on one occasion … bloodletting’ (Ober, Boswell’s Clap, p. 7). An electuary (used for laxative purposes) was ‘a medicinal conserve or paste, consisting of a powder or other ingredient mixed with honey, preserve, or syrup’ (OED).
12. Flexney … well known: William Flexney (?1731–1808), bookseller, at 319 Holborn, Southampton Buildings, near Gray’s Inn Gate. The trio’s abusive pamphlet, Critical Strictures on the New Tragedy of Elvira, Written by Mr. David Malloch, 24 pages long and printed for Flexney, appeared anonymously on 27 January.
1. an italian Lady: She was Viennese, not Italian, but she was Roman Catholic, spoke Italian (as well as French) fluently, had danced with the Italian Opera Company at the King’s Theatre, and collected Italian art.
2. Lord Burlington gave her £10000: Richard Boyle (1694–1753), 3rd Earl of Burlington, and Dorothy (Savile) (1699–1758), Lady Burlington, were Violette’s patrons in her London career, and she lived at their house in Piccadilly until her marriage. But Garrick himself settled the £10,000 on her (though she received also the interest on Lady Burlington’s Lincolnshire estates).
3. Doctor Brown … &c: John Brown DD (1715–66), clergyman (at this time minister of St Nicholas, Newcastle upon Tyne), author, poet, playwright and amateur musician. This year he published his Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music (a treatise on the general history of music). His play Athelstan (in which Garrick acted) was performed at Covent Garden in February 1756. His polemical moral tract An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757) had been a popular success, attracted many ripostes, and won him the sobriquet ‘Estimate’ Brown. Boswell had published a short poem on the battle between Brown and his antagonists in Donaldson’s Collection II.
4. Roscius: Quintus Roscius Gallus (c.126–62 bc), famous Roman actor, whose name became a synonym for greatness or perfection in acting. (Churchill’s title The Rosciad alludes to him.)
1. Smith: Adam Smith (1723–90), from 1751 professor of logic, and from 1752 professor of moral philosophy, at the University of Glasgow, where, during his abbreviated year there as a student, 1759–60, Boswell had admired him as a teacher, and in his private character. Best known now for his analysis of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and as the economic theorist of The Wealth of Nations (1st edn 1776).
2. Hume’s six Volumes: The first volume of Hume’s History of England (on the Stuart reigns, James I and Charles I) appeared in 1754, the second (from the death of Charles I to the Revolution of 1688) in 1756, two volumes on the reigns of the Tudors in 1759, and two covering the period from Julius Caesar to Henry VI in 1761 (dated 1762). The History of England, from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, a new ‘corrected’ edition of all six volumes, was issued in 1762.
1. an Advocate in the parliament house: The Scottish Court of Session, the supreme court for civil cases, sat in rooms in the Parliament House in Edinburgh (its Outer House being in the Parliament Hall, in which the Scots parliament had sat from 1639 until the Union of 1707). The High Court of Justiciary (the supreme court for criminal cases) met in the Council House, adjoining the Parliament Hall.
1. abuse the Scotch so grossly: As well as the North Briton articles, Churchill this month advertised his abusively anti-Scots The Prophecy of Famine. A Scots Pastoral.
2. frank some covers: That is, frank – write ‘Free, Eglinton’ on – some wrappers for letters. Boswell is already planning to use part of the time of his confinement in a busy correspondence.
3. pulled … the mire: ‘Pull me out of the net that they have laid privily for me: for thou art my strength’ (Psalms 31:4). ‘Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink: let me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the deep waters’ (Psalms 69:14).
4. the Election … in dependance: These friends were alleging, that is, that Eglinton’s motive in taking Boswell up in London in 1760 was that he was seeking Boswell’s father’s political support. Eglinton’s was the most powerful political interest at this time in the county of Ayrshire, but the earls of Cassillis and of Loudoun competed against him. In 1759 he was seeking election support (including Bute’s) in the county, where Lord Auchinleck was influential, and in 1760 he had even considered renouncing his peerage to stand for election to the House of Commons. In the event, his brother Archibald Montgomerie (see 29 May, n. 3) campaigned, and was returned unopposed.
5. wrote to me: The letters mentioned in this conversation have not survived.
6. candour: ‘sweetness of temper … openness … kindness’ (Johnson’s Dictionary).
7. Lord Bute’s levee: A general social reception held by the Prime Minister.
8. nice things: Delicate, complicated matters.
9. physic: Medicine.
1. Irwine: Probably Robert Irving (1704–72), of the Irving of Bonshaw family, a Writer to the Signet (that is, a writer whose membership of an ancient Scots legal society conferred certain privileges) in Edinburgh. A friend of both Johnston and Boswell, he was now visiting London. Johnston will write to Boswell on 24 February, ‘Mr. Irving returned about 4 weeks ago, he regretted much not having seen you’ (Corr. 1, p. 52).
2. moderate: The ‘moderate’ seems to be a guard against the ‘too much physic’ that made him ill the day before.
3. write mother & Cairnie: These letters have not survived. (On the letter to Dr John Cairnie, see 1 February, n. 1.)
4. Mr. Ward[,] a Physical young man: Richard Ward, evidently a young medical practitioner, in whose care John Boswell had been placed in Edinburgh.
1. Give ord[er]s for Sherid[an] & Irvine: Alert the Terries to admit these visitors.
2. the Highlander … hand in use: Evidently a proverbial expression, referring to a fictional Highlander who put hay in his pockets to give his hand something to play with (i.e. to give himself the illusion of useful activity). If a precise literary reference, it has not been traced.
1. lively reflections & Essays and Kames’s letter &c: Boswell, as will be seen in the next few entries, uses the time of his confinement to write various essays and other pieces. The last known letter he had from Lord Kames (to which he is here perhaps contemplating a reply) was dated 5 December 1762.
2. blood me: Bloodletting was a routine medical practice of the time, thought to provide a purgative healing effect.
1. Stewart: Unclear which ‘Stewart’. Perhaps Captain Keith Stewart, or Alexander Stewart of the EIC, who have already appeared in the journal; or Houston Stewart Nicholson, or Colonel Stuart Douglas, who will appear later.
2. Richardson for review: Perhaps Joseph Richardson (d. 1763), bookseller in Paternoster Row (his had been one of the names appearing on the title page of Collection II), or William Richardson, printer of the first twenty-five issues of the North Briton. What ‘review’ Boswell has in mind here is not clear.
3. to give father return: Boswell was writing summary commentaries on Hume’s History, and including them in letters in reply to his father’s.
4. Blair & Sir Dav[id]: The Rev. Hugh Blair and Sir David Dalrymple. Blair (1718–1800), a leading Church of Scotland minister of the Moderate party, was one of the most prominent and popular sermonists of his day, minister of the Edinburgh High Church from 1758, literary critic, and from August 1762 to 1783 Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres at the University of Edinburgh. Boswell and Blair had had cordial social dealings in Edinburgh. Blair was at this time championing Macpherson’s Ossianic poetry, in the work on which he had been closely involved, and his Critical Dissertation on the Poems of Ossian appeared this year. The date of the letter Boswell plans here is not known, but Blair will write back on 19 February that ‘I could not wish for a more agreable correspondent and shall be very fond of exchanging letters with you sometimes.’ Blair’s reply notes that he has read Elvira (‘an exceeding dull tragedy’) and the Critical Strictures (which has ‘a great deal of true wit in it, as well as just Severity’), and thanks Boswell for his ‘favorable opinion & accounts of’ the Critical Dissertation on Ossian. He is to come to London at ‘the end of March or the beginning of April’, and gratefully accepts the offer Boswell has made to be his guide for some of the visit (Yale C 156). Dalrymple (1726–92), 3rd Baronet, was a Scottish lawyer (raised to the Court of Session as Lord Hailes in 1766, and to the Court of Justiciary in 1776), historian and man of letters. Some fourteen years Boswell’s senior, he was a friend to both Boswell and Lord Auchinleck. He had studied law in Utrecht, and, having much enjoyed his time and company there, would suggest it to Lord Auchinleck (who had first inclined towards Leiden) as the place for Boswell himself to study. (Despite the Union of 1707, Scotland and England retained different legal systems. Scots law, unlike English, derived from Roman law; Dutch jurists were celebrated as masters of this law, and young Scots lawyers often went to Holland for study.) Boswell’s correspondence with Dalrymple – which Dalrymple readily welcomed, asking indeed that Boswell write once a week rather than the once a fortnight he had proposed – will become one of his pleasantest experiences of this winter.
5. keep Taylors secret: The ‘Taylors’ has not survived among the recovered papers. In summer 1767, Samuel Foote (for whom see 9 May, n. 1) produced at the Haymarket Theatre a burlesque three-act tragedy in verse, The Taylors (or, The Quadrupeds): A Tragedy for Warm Weather. It has been ascribed, but not with certainty, to Foote. Boswell may have been author or part-author, or at least the originator of the idea (though nothing in his surviving writings says so).
6. The Martyrdom of King Charles … this day: Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649. Sermons in his memory were encouraged by the government after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, in which year Parliament declared Charles I a martyr, and ordered prayers to be said in his memory on the anniversary of his death. (Boswell named his son by Peggy Doig ‘Charles’ after ‘our Martyr’d Sovereign’ (Corr. 1, p.103). The practice was not universally observed, and the fast day was eventually suppressed in 1859.
1. inclose to some body: Boswell wrote anxiously to Johnston in a letter of Saturday 29 January that he had not heard from him in two weeks. He enclosed the letter in one to Dr Cairnie, he explained, for ‘fear of miscarriage’ (that is, in case his letters and journal packets to Johnston had gone astray or been intercepted) (Corr. 1, pp. 42–3).
1. Mark Pan & Honey: The ‘Pan’ that Boswell wishes to mark in his expense account (along with his honey) is unexplained.
2. to Love to take box: The box he wishes Love to take is unexplained.
3. balm: Some kind of topical salve or ointment, perhaps a result of his consultation with surgeon Douglas for his ‘inflammation’ (30 January), or for the inflammation and ‘cold’ reported in his entry for 4 February. An example advertised in newspapers of the time is the biblically named ‘Essence of the Balm of Gilead’, which claimed to give ‘immediate Relief in all Consumptive and Asthmatic Complaints’, guard ‘the Body against the bad Consequences of a fresh-caught Cold, and cureth the Cough’ and prevent ‘Vapours and Lowness of Spirits’. It ‘strengthens the Stomach, creates an Appetite, and helps Digestion; from which Complaint almost all Disorders originally proceed’. This balm was available from George Kearsley, bookseller (see 9 February, n. 5).
4. Patriots: MPs claiming a party independence, based on a disinterested devotion to liberty and opposition to tyranny. (The term ‘Patriots’ was originally appropriated in the 1730s by the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole, led by Pitt.) Johnson added in the fourth edition of his Dictionary (1773) a supplementary definition of ‘Patriot,’ as a term ‘sometimes used for a factious disturber of the government’. Dempster is alleging that these MPs have become government supporters not through actual patriotism, but through bribery. They are the basis of Johnson’s much-quoted remark in the Life: ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’ (Life, p. 448).
5. my violin: Boswell had begun to learn to play the violin in late 1761, but his efforts were short-lived. He wrote later that he found it difficult, and so gave it up.
1. in chair straight: Boswell plans to go by chair direct to Drury Lane theatre tonight to see the premiere of The Discovery.
2. rare Ben: Ben Jonson in his later years was the doyen of wits and writers who gathered at the Mermaid Tavern, Cheapside. ‘O rare Ben Jonson’ is the inscription on his monument in Westminster Abbey.
3. Johnny: Boswell’s brother, John Boswell. Boswell is to receive a visit this day from Dr Pringle, to whom (as noted in n. 1 for 5 January) Lord Auchinleck had written about John’s condition, and whom Lord Auchinleck has asked Boswell to consult about it. Boswell had told himself in his memorandum for 31 January to ‘Send to Pringle & confer’.
4. at Marchmont house: Boswell visited Marchmont House, in Berwickshire, home of Hugh Hume (1708–94), 3rd Earl of Marchmont, a Scottish politician who had been a friend of the Pope circle, on 18 October 1762, during his Harvest Jaunt, and noted in his diary, ‘I was very dull this day. I despised myself. I was silent and made no kind of show’ ( Jaunt, p. 86).
5. The Discovery: This play and Elvira were the only two new main-pieces introduced by Garrick this season. It featured (like Elvira) an impressive cast, with its main parts acted by Sheridan (as Lord Medway), Garrick himself (Sir Anthony Branville), Hannah Pritchard (Lady Medway) and Jane Pope (Louisa Medway).
6. his Society: The Faculty of Advocates in Edinburgh.
7. Rose tavern: In Russell Street, Covent Garden, in the passageway adjoining the Drury Lane theatre.
8. Doctor Goldsmith: Oliver Goldsmith had studied medicine in Edinburgh 1752–4, and heard medical lectures later while in the Netherlands. Though no record exists that he ever took a medical degree, he had set up a medical practice for a time in Southwark.
1. read Miss T M: Meaning obscure. The letters ‘T’ and ‘M’ are not certain.
2. Graham, or some other partner: Perhaps a reference to Graham of Gartmore (mentioned in the journal for 18 June).
3. Lee in Parl[our]: Explained in the journal entry for 8 February.
4. Strictures: Unclear. Perhaps he is still remembering Dempster’s suggestion (which he rejected) to damn The Discovery. Or perhaps he is urging himself not to indulge in criticisms of plays when he is with Lee on Monday.
5. Mr. Lloyd … his Magazine: Robert Lloyd (1733–64), poet and journalist, edited the St. James’s Magazine from 1762. (Boswell will meet him on 24 May.)
6. whinstones: ‘A name for various very hard dark-coloured rocks or stones, as greenstone, basalt, chert, or quartzose sandstone’ (OED).
7. much gold: It is highly probable that the prospect of Letters E–B was among the topics of conversation that Boswell has here summarized.
8. periods: In formal rhetoric, grammatically complete sentences, clausally balanced, in a rhythmic whole.
1. well wt. Lee: Lee, with whom Boswell urges himself to be ‘well’, was (it should be recalled) known to ‘Louisa’ (see the journal for 14 December and n. 12).
2. Read Dryden: Possibly in The Miscellaneous Works of John Dryden Esq. containing all his Original Poems, Tales and Translations … With explanatory Notes and Observations. Also an account of his Life and Writings, which Samuel Derrick (who will appear later in the journal) had brought out in four volumes in 1760.
3. all dramatic Authors: Which of the available contemporary collections of plays Boswell has in mind cannot be known. It may have been the twelve-volume Theatrical Records: or, An Account of the English Dramatic Authors, and Their Works, first published by the Dodsleys in 1756.
4. Boswell fecit: Latin, ‘Boswell “made” it’ – a playful use of this poetic or artistic signature.
1. part affectionate: That is, be sure to part affectionately from his troubled brother John, who is to return to Scotland on 10 February.
2. Philip of Macedon that he was a man: Philip II, king of Macedon (382–336 bc, r. from 359), father of Alexander the Great. According to the historian Aelian (c.170–235) in his Various History, ‘Philip, when he had vanquished the Athenians at Charonea, though exalted with his success, yet subdued his passion, and behaved himself not insolently. Therefore he thought it requisite to be put in mind by one of his Servants that he was a Man: wherefore he appointed this office to a Servant; neither did he go forth before that, as is said, nor was any that came to speak with him admitted before the Servant had cried aloud thrice to him, which he did daily. He said to him, “Philip, thou art a Man” ’ (trans. Thomas Stanley, 1670). The story, with various wordings, appeared also in other ancient sources, circulated widely, and was a commonplace by Boswell’s time.
3. in the Pathetic: In pathos (emotion, feeling, sentiment).
1. Dash: ‘Dash’ is Andrew Erskine’s nickname (possibly because it is the name of one of the four ‘scribblers’ in Fielding’s The Author’s Farce (1730)). He is to come and sup with Boswell this night.
2. ag[ains]t Malloch: Boswell is evidently planning more attacks on David Mallet.
3. the public ledger: The newspaper The Public Ledger, or Daily Register of Commerce and Intelligence, first published in 1760 by John Newbery (1713–67).
4. rigg … out: Outfit him, pay for his clothing and basic equipment.
5. Mr. Kearsley: George Kearsley (?1739–90), bookseller, with premises at this time at the Golden Fleece, Ludgate Street.
6. the Penny Post: A postal service first set up by private merchants in London about 1680 and, proving profitable, taken over soon after by the government, to carry letters and small packets in London and environs (in a 10-mile radius) for the standard cost to the sender of a penny.
1. Make out letters — mention Temple & Johnston: Perhaps, copy letters for the planned volume, Letters E–B, and be sure to mention Temple and Johnston in them. The plans for preparing Letters E–B were now fully launched. On this day, Boswell wrote to Johnston, ‘Immediatly upon receipt of this execute the Commission which it contains. I want to have the copies which I kept of my letters to Erskine.’ He told Johnston where they were to be found, ‘And by the very first post send the copies of the letters in separate parcels inclosed to Mr. Terrie’ (Corr. 1, p. 45).
2. Settle … £8: He wishes an abatement from Terrie of his rental charge of not less than £8.
3. the milk of human kindness: From Lady Macbeth’s speech, ‘Yet I do fear thy nature, / It is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness / To catch the nearest way’ (Macbeth I.v.17).
4. between my Father and me: When the clashes between Boswell and his father in 1762 reached a crisis point, Lord Auchinleck drew up a document, which Boswell signed on 7 March, giving him power to vest the family estate in trustees of his own choosing after his death. The other witness was James Ferguson (c.1700/01–77) of Pitfour, dean of the Faculty of Advocates (and from 1764 a judge of the Court of Session).
1. whimsical: Boswell ponders an idea to present to Erskine about the title of their volume of letters. The word ‘whimsical’ was not in the event used.
1. push for flexney: Urge William Flexney as the best publisher for the volume of letters.
2. sensible: Palpable, directly influencing the emotions and well-being.
3. foul fiend: Of despondency. Boswell invokes the phrase used several times by Edgar in King Lear, when disguised as Poor Tom, a madman.
1. Keep Dash fine … at ease: Boswell wants to persuade Erskine to agree to an ‘elegant’ (not cheap) volume, swear to absolute secrecy, and seek £50 each in copy money for Letters E–B.
2. several fancifull little Essays: At least some were attempts at humorous or satiric treatments of contemporary political topics. One was ‘Hopromp’ (described in n. 2 for 14 February), and another was perhaps ‘The Footman with the Blunderbuss – a fine way of training the nation to Arms’ (a brief outline of which survives among Boswell’s papers from about this time).
1. new letters: Boswell is rewriting letters and composing wholly new ones specifically for the planned volume.
2. Hopromp … North Brit: Signed ‘Risor’ (Latin for ‘he who laughs’, or ‘laugher’, ‘mocker’), the essay ‘Hopromp’ compares recent changes in Bute’s administration to what Boswell says is a Scottish rural or folk game, Hop-Romp. Boswell indeed sent it for publication in the North Briton, with a covering note signed ‘your constant Reader and Admirer’, but it was not used. It is now among the undated General Correspondence of John Wilkes in the British Library (Add. MSS 30876, ff. 20–21; the covering letter f. 179).
1. Fin[ish] … to go: ‘Fin[ish]’ is speculative, Boswell’s word here being difficult to decipher. The ‘to go’ probably means ‘to go (i.e. to be sent) to Johnston’.
2. no real names … sentences: In the event, real names were indeed used in Letters E–B; ‘serious sentences’ are grave moral maxims.
1. fletcher: Probably George Fletcher (b. c.1751), who went out seaman on the East India Company’s Earl of Middlesex in 1766, then midshipman on the Duke of Kingston in 1768, fifth mate on Hector in 1771, and third mate on Morse in 1773. At this time he was a lad of 11 or 12 years old.
2. vanquish’d by a grin: Brown wrote, ‘And coxcombs vanquish Berkeley with a grin’ (‘Essay on Satire, Occasion’d by the Death of Mr. Pope’, l. 212). The poem first appeared in 1745, and was included in Dodsley’s Collection. Bishop George Berkeley (1685– 1753), Irish philosopher, explored ‘immaterialism’ chiefly in his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710) and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (1713). In a critique of the empiricist theory of John Locke (1632–1704), Berkeley contended that the perceiving mind, rather than the existence of material substance, constitutes the ultimate reality.
1. bill: Probably for stocks and shoes from Edinburgh. Boswell asked Johnston in a letter of 18 January to get him some stocks made, and to send them ‘in little packets addrest to Mr. Terrie’. He had earlier ordered six pairs of ‘shoes and Pumps’ from Orlando Hart, and he asked Johnston to pay the bill and have the items sent to him in London by sea. ‘Pay him for them and send me his receipt, and let me know both how much both the Stocks and the Shoes come to and I will remit you the money by a sure hand’ (Corr. 1, p. 40). Johnston will write on 24 February, ‘The Stocks are made. I will send them to Mr. Terrie’ (ibid., p. 52). Boswell will write on 29 March, ‘This morning I received the Packets with the stocks which I am very pleased with’ (ibid., p. 62). The shoes will arrive later (see the memorandum for 19 March).
2. if John left guinea: Evidently he did not. Boswell wrote to Johnston as late as 29 March that ‘My brother John owes me a guinea’ (Corr. 1, p. 62). Dun had earlier outfitted John and lodged him in Edinburgh, and John was still in debt to him.
3. let[ter] to North[umberland] House: The letter Dun was to carry may be the one mentioned in the memorandum for 15 February, ‘Send to Lady North[umberland]’, which is probably the one transcribed into the journal for 19 February.
4. Get Coch[rane] & payment of bill: Presumably, talk to his banker, William Cochrane, about the bill for Hart.
5. Think … presumptous: Boswell’s momentary hesitancy here about Letters E–B, and his turn (recorded in the lengthy journal entry for 18 February) to melancholy thoughts of returning to Scotland and following a legal career, are doubtless a consequence of his reconfiguration of his feelings about Erskine (and Dempster) following the humiliating hoax about David Hume.
1. have some acquaintance of: Dempster and Hume were friends (fellow members of the Poker Club – a social group of literati and other eminent men set up initially to support the cause of a Scots militia – and of the Select Society in Edinburgh). Erskine met Hume, in Boswell’s company, in November 1762.
2. frogs in the fable: In a fable of Aesop, some mischievous boys see some frogs in a pond, begin pelting them with stones, and kill several of them. One of the frogs cries out for them to stop, for ‘what is sport to you is death to us’ (Fable 398 in the popular and much-reprinted 1692 translation, Aesop, by Sir Roger L’Estrange).
3. Memorial: In Scots law, a statement of facts drawn up to be submitted for counsel’s opinion; also, an advocate’s brief. Hume had studied law, and had served as librarian of the Advocates’ Library in Edinburgh.
4. Lords of Session: The judges of the Scottish Court of Session.
5. alas poor Boswell: Echoing Hamlet’s words on the deceased court jester Yorick, ‘Alas poor Yorick’ (Hamlet V.i.184). The expression was popular also more recently through the character of Parson Yorick in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.
1. Sir Dav[id] & Father & James Bruce & Campbell: Sir David Dalrymple, Lord Auchinleck, and James Bruce (1719–90) – the Auchinleck estate overseer, with whom Boswell had a close friendship. The ‘Campbell’ may be Bruce Campbell (1734–1813), of Mayfield and Milrig, Boswell’s second cousin, an agricultural improver (a pioneer breeder of the Ayrshire cattle), who would advise Boswell on farming matters at Auchinleck after he succeeded as laird in 1782. Boswell mentions in the journal for 11 May that he ‘had a letter sometime ago from Bruce Campbell’.
2. he got a Company the other day: Webster was made a captain in his regiment, the 33rd Foot, on 14 January.
3. Calcraft the great Agent: John Calcraft (1726–72) held several lucrative appointments and won commissions for armed-services contracts, and by the end of the Seven Years War the regiments for which he was agent (a civilian who administered the business of the regiment) covered about a full half of the army. He was known for his ruthless energy and ambitiousness, grew wealthy and politically influential, and was later MP for Calne (1766–8) and for Rochester (1768–72). He had earlier lived with the actress George Anne Bellamy (now living with West Digges) while married to another woman, and she bore him two children.
4. Mr. Fox: Henry Fox (1705–74), from April 1763 Lord Holland, to whom (in a way not clear) Calcraft was apparently related. Secretary of State 1755–6, and at this time MP for Dunwich, leader of the House of Commons, and Bute’s parliamentary manager, Fox secured Calcraft many lucrative positions, until an irreparable breach between them in April of this year.
5. Crookshanks … Steward in England: Charles Crookshanks (c.1722–1809), whom Boswell remembered in later journals as one ‘with whom I passed many a pleasant hour at the late Lord Eglinton’s in London’ (6 November 1778; Laird, p. 42). The ‘steward’ is the ‘official who controls the domestic affairs of a household, supervising the service of his master’s table, directing the domestics, and regulating household expenditure; a majordomo’ (OED).
6. a Rattle: One ‘who talks incessantly in a lively or inane manner; a constant chatterer’ (OED).
1. History of Joseph and his Brethren: Told in Genesis 37–50. (Boswell had noted in his memorandum for 28 January his plan ‘to go thro’ all bible’.) The young Joseph, beloved son of Rachel and Jacob, has self-centred dreams of his superiority over his father and brothers. His brothers plot to murder him, but he is spared, then sold into slavery in Egypt, where, in the service of Potiphar, a captain of the guard, the handsome but morally upright young man resists the sexual approaches of Potiphar’s wife (as a result of which he is unjustly imprisoned). Joseph’s ability to interpret dreams brings him to the notice of the Pharoah, who charges him with preparations for the coming seven years of famine. In this time, Joseph puts his brothers (sent by Jacob into Egypt to buy grain) to various tests, leading eventually to a restoration of family harmony. Joseph goes on to become the patriarchal ancestor of one of twelve tribes of Israel.
2. in the Coldstream Regiment: True. Steele enlisted in the 2nd troop of Life Guards in 1692, and transferred to the Coldstream Guards in 1695, with his commission as ensign and a brevet rank of captain coming in 1697. His tract The Christian Hero was published in 1701.
3. amusing: Beguiling, diverting, ‘engaging the mind or attention in a pleasing way’ (OED).
1. Shoy: ‘Joy’. The opening of the letter is written in mock or stage ‘Irish.’
1. half pay … in mean time: Boswell is planning to suggest to Lady Northumberland that he serve as an ensign on half-pay while he pursues his commission.
2. get money: That is, collect his next quarter’s allowance from Cochrane (journal for 4 March).
3. Mr. William Cochrane[,] Judge Advocate for Scotland: William Cochrane (d. 1766), Edinburgh lawyer, had succeeded his father, James Cochrane of Waterside (who died in August 1762), as Judge Advocate in 1757. He was Boswell’s mother’s second cousin. The Judge Advocate is the officer who conducts the prosecution in courts-martial.
4. Burntsfield Links … taking their walks: Bruntsfield (with its ancient golf links) and The Meadows, which adjoined it, were popular promenades, about twenty minutes’ walk south-west of Edinburgh’s centre. The Spring Sacrament, one of the twice-yearly special celebrations of Holy Communion in the Church of Scotland, had evolved into an important social as well as religious occasion.
1. Epist to Ersk[ine]: The ‘Epistle to Erskine’, a verse letter Boswell sent to Erskine from Auchinleck, 4 May 1762. It will appear, as Letter XXVII, in Letters E–B.
2. petitotian Corp: Erskine’s regiment, the 71st Foot, whose proprietary colonel was Major General William Petitot (d. 1764). Boswell had used a similar expression, ‘Petitonian corps’, to describe the regiment in the ‘Epistle to Erskine’ (Corr. 9, p. 235).
3. Chetwynd: John Chetwynd, peruke-maker in Downing Street.
1. Mcdonald: Alexander (‘Sandy’) Macdonald (explained in the journal entry). In planning his thoughts on meeting him, Boswell here lists a sequence of Scots Highland and mostly Jacobite associations.
2. Countess of Eglintoune: Eglinton’s mother, Susannah (Kennedy) Montgomerie (1689–1780), the celebrated Countess of Eglinton, famous as a beauty, and patroness of the poet Allan Ramsay. Boswell in later life enjoyed cordial relations with her, and after Eglinton’s death, from a gunshot wound in 1769, she gave Boswell all her son’s letters to her.
3. Miss Mcleod: Not (in this context) a person, but a musical piece, the name of a Scottish reel. In one of his language-practice exercises (‘Themes’) kept in Holland, Boswell will note that (translated from his original French) in ‘the Highlands of Scotland they have music undoubtedly original. Their slow airs are very pathetic and their brisk airs, their reels, have a surprising vivacity. They are for dancing the best in the world’ (Yale M 87, c.26–28 Oct. 1763).
4. Alexander Macdonald: Younger son of Donald Macdonald of Castletown, Isle of Skye. He and McQuhae probably knew each other at the University of Glasgow, to which he matriculated in 1755 (McQuhae in 1752, taking his MA in 1756). (Boswell’s term ‘Doctor’ is playful, as McQuhae was not yet even ordained a minister, and would not become a DD until 1794.) In a letter of 26 April, McQuhae will thank Boswell for his ‘kind Behaviour to Sandy McDonald … I had a letter from him since, he speaks of you most feelingly’ (Corr. 9, p. 405).
5. the Lord Mansfield Indiaman: The EIC vessel, Lord Mansfield, on which Macdonald was ship’s surgeon, was to sail for Bombay on 25 March, and return in July 1765. It was captained by another Scots Highlander, Alexander MacLeod (d. 1790), who eventually made a fortune in EIC service, and in the 1770s purchased the barony of Harris, where he developed its fisheries.
6. Mary Queen of Scots … affection: In Rome in 1765, Boswell himself would commission from the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton (1723–98) a painting of Mary being forced to resign her crown (the scene drawn from Robertson’s History). It hangs now in the Hunterian Art Gallery, University of Glasgow. Also in Rome, the exiled Jacobite Andrew Lumisden (1720–1801), secretary to the Old Pretender, would present him with a miniature of Queen Mary.
7. the family of Auchinleck had been raised by it: Boswell’s paternal grandfather, James Boswell, studied at Glasgow and Leiden in the 1690s, became an advocate in Edinburgh, and built one of the most considerable practices of his day. Aided by the frugality and good management of his wife, Lady Elizabeth Bruce (d. 1734), he freed the estate from earlier debt, restored portions that had been lost, and acquired additional lands. Lord Auchinleck was continuing the consolidation and expansion.
8. Advocate depute on the Circuits: An advocate depute deputized for the Lord Advocate on the three Scottish judicial circuits (the western, the northern and the southern). In 1758 Boswell had accompanied his father on the northern circuit, when Sir David Dalrymple had been along as advocate depute, and again in 1761.
9. Baron of Exchequer: The Court of Exchequer, consisting of a Lord Chief Baron and four other barons, had jurisdiction in customs, excise and other matters relating to Crown revenue. It sat in rooms on the floor above the Inner House of the Court of Session. It followed English procedures, and barons could be and were appointed from the English Bar. See also n. 3 for 25 February.
10. otium cum dignitate: Latin, ‘leisure with dignity’ or ‘dignified ease’; adapted (‘cum dignitate otium’) from the Roman orator Cicero (106–43 bc)(Oratio pro Publio Sextio, xlv.98, and appearing also in his Epistulae ad familiares, I.ix.21). The phrase became famous as Cicero’s conception of an ideal retirement.
11. Duncan Forbes … Baron Grant: Duncan Forbes (1685–1747) of Culloden, Scottish lawyer, MP for Inverness Burghs (1722–37), Lord Advocate from 1725, and from 1737 Lord President of the Court of Session. Baron Dalrymple: The Hon. George Dalrymple (1680–1745) of Dalmahoy, a Baron of Exchequer from 1708. (He was the father of Mrs Bland, mentioned in the entry for 14 December.) He and Forbes were Scottish legal men of Boswell’s grandfather’s generation, of whom he would have heard only in report. Baron Maule: John Maule (1706–81) of Inverkeillor, MP for Aberdeen Burghs 1739–48, from 1748 a Baron of the Court of Exchequer. Baron Grant: John Grant (d. ?1777) of Elchies, Baron of Exchequer from 1755.
12. Books like Lord Kames: The prolific and versatile Kames had by this time published, among much else, digests of legal decisions, a work on British antiquities, Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion (1751), Principles of Equity (1760), Introduction to the Art of Thinking (1761), and most recently a work of literary theory, Elements of Criticism (1762). Other legal, philosophical and agricultural writings would follow. Boswell later contemplated writing Kames’s biography, and collected materials towards this project (which remained unfulfilled).
13. Machine: Generic name for a horse-drawn vehicle, but in context Boswell means a fine coach or chariot, a mark of wealth and social status.
14. the Church of England Chapel like Pitfour: Ferguson of Pitfour, a very able lawyer, attended the Church of England’s ‘qualified’ chapels (something that may have delayed his elevation to the bench of the Court of Session until 1764, when he was in his mid-sixties).
15. dutch relations: Boswell’s Dutch great-grandmother, Veronica van Aerssen van Sommelsdyck, married Alexander Bruce (d. 1680), 2nd Earl of Kincardine, in The Hague in 1659. Their daughter, Lady Elizabeth Bruce, was Lord Auchinleck’s mother. Francis Cornelius van Sommelsdyck (1725–93), Lord Auchinleck’s second cousin, later Baron van Aerssen, was a Dutch military commander. Boswell’s experiences in Holland in 1763–4, where he was indeed welcomed cordially by his Dutch relations, were recorded in his continuation of this journal, but most of that journal was lost in his own lifetime. A reconstruction from other surviving documents can be found in Boswell in Holland, 1763–1764, ed. F. A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill; London: Heinemann, 1952).
1. the great feast day: Boswell seems to mean no more than that he will save up his honey for Saturday, which, as noted (27 November, n. 17), is his favourite day of the week.
2. six sheets … negligent: The ‘six sheets’ are the regular allotment of journal that Boswell has determined to send weekly to Johnston. Boswell wrote his journal entries on halves of sheets of uniform size, folded to make two quarto-sized leaves, with the sheets used as units (that is, with the writing proceeding through the four pages of each half-sheet), and Johnston received 24 pages (‘six sheets’) in each instalment.
3. Attend courts soon: He is pondering (as he contemplates the idea of a career in law) his father’s advice in a letter of 27 November 1762 to spend his time in London profitably, by attending debates in Parliament and ‘likewise attending the Courts of Chancery & Exchequer. The Court of Chancery proceeds on Equity & you will easily understand what passes, And the Exchequer Law is of great use and what the Lawyers of this Country are little used to and you may soon pick up as much knowledge as by taking notes will enable you to make a figure in this Country’ (Yale C 211).
4. animal spirits: Originally, term for the primary principle of sensation and voluntary motion (from Latin, anima, ‘soul’); in this more colloquial sense, ‘nervous vivacity, natural gayety of disposition’ (OED).
5. cause: Scots term for legal ‘case’.
1. abroad: Out of his lodgings and into social life.
2. sceptical notions: That is, about revealed religion. In a letter of 29 October 1763, written to try to cheer up Boswell in his initial despondency in Holland, Dempster wrote, ‘Pray indulge your sceptical turn. You are already convinced of the insignificancy and uncertainty of things. By scepticism you will soon discover that some things are less insignificant and uncertain than others. Believe me, dear Boswell, Revelation is nonsense. GOD never manifested himself but by his works. Disbelieve whatever the clergy have invented to enfeeble and debase mankind and to aggrandize themselves. My study is to be perfectly moral while I live and indifferent when I die. You can’t conceive what magnanimity the very pursuit of these objects inspires. Enthusiasm is madness, superstition folly, and faith a farce’ (Boswell in Holland: McGraw-Hill, p. 19; Heinemann, pp. 18–19).
3. Cabinet of curiositys: Ancestors of modern museums (the term ‘cabinet’ originally meant a room): collections of artworks, trinkets, gems and other objects from the natural world.
4. Glaiks: Tricks, deceptions, pranks.
5. the Cure of Saul … Doctor Brown: Brown’s The Cure of Saul: a Sacred Ode had just been published (a copy had presumably been brought to Boswell by Erskine on this visit). Brown wrote the text of this oratorio, and selected some of the music (from Handel, Henry Purcell (1659–95) and others), which was arranged by the composer Samuel Arnold (1740–1802). It played as ‘Occasional Oratorio’ at Covent Garden on 18 February, and was due to play again on 25 February but was cancelled (as a consequence of the ‘half-price riots’ the night before, for which see 9 April, n. 4), and played on 4 March. Boswell will attend the 27 April performance. The parodies, if written, have not survived. In a letter to Boswell in Holland, Dempster wrote, ‘How lucky your jeu d’esprit and Erskine’s never was published’ (19 Nov. 1763; Boswell in Holland: McGraw-Hill, p. 73; Heinemann, p. 71) – perhaps a reference to one of these parodies.
1. a Battallion of the Guards from Germany: Ligonier’s regiment. ‘Yesterday a Battalion of the first Regiment of Foot Guards, which landed on Friday at Gravesend, arrived on the Parade in St. James’s Park from Germany. They consisted of seven Companies, and went to the neighbourhood of Lincoln’s-Inn Fields, where they received billets to be quartered’ (St. James’s Chronicle, 28 Feb. 1763).
2. Æneæas: In the Aeneid by Virgil (70–19 bc), the Trojan warrior-hero who journeyed arduously to Italy after the fall of Troy.
1. his Printer: Flexney’s printer, Samuel Chandler (1732–d. after 1775) in Charlotte Street, Hatton Garden, near Gray’s Inn Gate.
2. Write Johnst[on] … Journ: Boswell will write to Johnston on 1 March with elaborate instructions for the journal’s preservation, and added, ‘It would oblige me much if you would sit down and write a character of my Journal, just as it would appear to you, if written by an indifferent Person. It would als[o] oblige me if you would make out a sort of index to each division as you go along, and send me a copy of it’ (Corr. 1, p. 54). Johnston carefully preserved the journal, but, busy with his own life, appears not to have complied with the other requests.
3. Make Landlady happy with Dempster’s Crown: Unexplained. Perhaps Dempster made a present of a crown (a 5s. coin) to Mrs Terrie.
4. Etourderie: Properly étourderie, French for ‘thoughtlessness, carelessness, flightiness’.
5. little man … good terms: Hume, anxious to write ‘correct’ English, had sought the aid of David Mallet, as a literary Scot who had long lived in England, in identifying (for the purpose of eliminating) ‘Scotticisms’ in his History. He wrote to thank Mallet on 8 November 1762, and again on 7 April of this year to say he was ‘extremely impatient’ to receive from him a list of such errors that Mallet had said he had compiled in the two most recently published volumes of his History (The Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), vol. 1, pp. 369, 386).
6. Harvest Jaunt 1762: Boswell’s entry for 4 November 1762, recording his visit with Erskine to Hume’s house in James’s Court, Edinburgh, indeed quotes Hume as saying that ‘Mr. Mallet has written bad tragedies because he is deficient in the pathetic’ (Jaunt, p. 101).
7. Becket’s shop: Thomas Becket (?1722–1813), bookseller, had his shop in Tully’s Head, corner of Adelphi, in the Strand, in partnership with Peter de Hondt. Becket was later to be one of Donaldson’s chief London opponents in the copyright battles.
8. Mr. Murphy the dramatic Writer: Arthur Murphy (1727–1805), actor, playwright and author, editor of the pro-Bute weekly newspaper The Auditor (whose brief run had just ended with the 8 February issue).
9. Sir Hanbury Williams … lodged: Sir Charles Hanbury Williams (1708–59), diplomatist and author. On returning from St Petersburg in 1758 he was confined (having shown signs of mental illness) for a time at a house in Kensington – Pitt’s Buildings, near Campden House – in which Brown had lodged earlier. Williams had written (but not published) a riposte to Brown’s Estimate.
1. family disputes: Among his landlord’s family.
2. the Critical day: Unclear. Perhaps the day on which he expects to see the Critical Review, or the day on which arrangements with Flexney for Letters E–B are formally completed.
3. may tell C—: If (as seems probable) the ‘C’ here is Cairnie, the reference may again be to the £40 owed to Hart. Boswell’s attempts to repay this bill by recovering an amount of £40 owed to him by James Love will prove a source of protracted annoyance to him during much of his London stay. He wrote to Johnston this day, ‘I had a letter from Cairnie last week. He tells me that Mr. Hart is to discharge the debt … and is to draw a bill upon me payable for the £40 and interest from the time the debt was contracted till the first of April. This I am to accept, and am to take Love’s bill in the same terms to me’ (Corr. 1, pp. 52–3). Boswell had various anxieties about this arrangement, which he wished Johnston to look into, and take up with Cairnie. The scheme in the end does not prove entirely successful. Boswell will repay this debt to Hart (on 5 April), but when he leaves London in early August he will be obliged to leave bills for demands on Love for £20 still owed to him (ibid., p. 106).
4. Box made: Boswell’s letter to Johnston this day continued, ‘Pray tell me honestly how do you preserve my Journal. I am affraid you have neglected to get a box made …’ Johnston will tell him on 18 April, ‘The Journal 492 pages [i.e. to the end of the entry for 3 April] is Lockd up in a Strong Box, with your private papers’ (Corr. 1, p. 71).
5. the Ladies: The Erskine sisters.
6. House Commons Friday: Dempster will take Boswell to the House of Commons on Friday 11 March.
7. a Bookseller at Glasgow: Boswell jests, of course, but there was indeed a David Home (pronounced ‘Hume’), Glasgow bookseller. (He is listed as being admitted to sanctuary for debt in July 1764.)
8. Sir John Fielding, or Mr. Saunders Welch: Fielding (1721–80) was the younger half-brother of Henry Fielding, whom he succeeded in 1754 as the leading magistrate in Westminster, sitting at Bow Street, Covent Garden. Though blinded at the age of 19, apparently by negligent treatment by a surgeon, he was an important pioneering urban legal and social reformer. (Boswell will have occasion to visit his court later.) Saunders Welch (1711–84), also a JP for Westminster, had been chief constable of Holborn, then for a time had shared Fielding’s duties before moving to his own magistrate’s office, in Litchfield Street.
9. Janitor of the High-school at Edinburgh: Mallet had indeed been a janitor (an usher or assistant master) here, where he himself was educated. (Boswell did not attend this school.)
10. as fools and as Knaves: The Critical Review of February 1763 gave the Strictures a single sentence: ‘We shall bestow no farther notice on these strictures than to say they appear to be the crude efforts of envy, petulance, and self-conceit.’
11. a very good one: Even so, the affable Hume did not reply. In a now well-known letter to Marie-Charlotte Hippolyte de Campet de Saujon (1724–1800), comtesse de Boufflers, dated 12 January 1766, Hume described Boswell as ‘a friend of mine; a young gentleman, very good-humoured, very agreeable, and very mad’ (Letters of David Hume, vol. 2, p. 11). Boswell’s hopes for a continuing correspondence with Hume were not to be fulfilled, though he and Hume remained acquainted with each other in later life in Edinburgh, where Hume’s sceptical philosophy, which Boswell regarded as ‘infidel’ (that is, atheistic), continued to be a source of fascination and disturbance to him.
1. first visit: He wishes to be able to tell Lady Northumberland that his visit to her will have been the first he has made to anyone since his confinement.
2. see Proof: A proof sheet from Flexney of Letters E–B.
1. Donaldson the Painter: John Donaldson (1737–1801), painter and miniaturist, who had moved from Edinburgh to London about 1760. Later, in Edinburgh, he did miniatures of Boswell and his wife, Margaret, and he and the Boswells met socially several times.
2. then lived … inducements: Johnston had recently moved from his former lodgings in the Lawnmarket to Don’s Close, where his buxom, agreeable landlady was a Mrs Fergusson. The portrait of him by Donaldson is not known to have survived.
1. whether to stop the gleet: With urethral irrigation.
2. what to give Douglas: Boswell needs Pringle’s opinion on the appropriate fee for Douglas’s recent treatment.
3. to Whitehall: He is intending to hear service at nearby Whitehall Chapel (but in the event actually goes to Spring Garden Chapel).
4. correct well: Correct the proofs of Letters E–B.
5. get last vol Hume: Boswell had borrowed five of the six volumes of Hume’s History from Dempster, and is reminding himself to get the sixth.
6. my first visit: Since his confinement. It was to have been, as noted, to Lady Northumberland, but she (he concluded) was deliberately avoiding him when he tried to call.
7. He that runs may read: ‘And the Lord answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it’ (Habakkuk 2:2). Pringle’s pun on ‘runs’ is to do with Boswell’s gleet: that is, Boswell may read while this discharge is ‘running’.
1. tell him the Story: Presumably the story of the dealings with Flexney for Letters E–B.
2. Spring-Garden Chapel: In Charing Cross.
3. Westminster-Bridge: Spanning the Thames from Westminster to Lambeth, and still at this time relatively new (built 1739–50). It offered, as well as a way of crossing the river other than the inadequate medieval London Bridge, beautiful new vistas of the city. Plagued by structural problems and requiring frequent repair, it would be demolished and replaced in 1862.
1. balsam … pot of balsamic: Evidently more ointments or medicines. Another such item frequently advertised in the press at this time was ‘Pectoral Balsam of Honey’, which promoted the many therapeutic decongestant benefits for colds and related illnesses of honey with a ‘Balsamick Addition’.
2. Duke’s … for all: Queensberry’s, for another final ‘push’ at securing a Guards commission.
3. on immense paper … Edition: Boswell thinks of proposing that Flexney produce three or four de-luxe volumes of Letters E–B, probably for use as presentation copies, and shows here that he was already ambitious for a second edition. Neither hope was to be fulfilled.
4. enjoy fine Lady Quality: Enjoy the company of Lady Macfarlane as a fine lady of quality.
5. Copy out neat: Copy out letters for Letters E–B, probably as printer’s copy.
1. take out two Morpeth’s: Cut from the volume two letters from Erskine written when his army regiment was quartered in Morpeth, Northumberland, in early 1762.
2. Brompton: In south-east Kensington. It was a popular area at this time with artists, actors and singers.
1. General Cochrane & Hampstead: Lieutenant General James Cochrane, Boswell’s maternal great-uncle (father of Mrs Gould) died in Hampstead in 1758. Hampstead, about 4 miles north of central London, had become an attractive and fashionable village, appealing because of its high elevation and its iron-rich spring.
2. of course: Anyway; as a matter of course.
3. Poems &c for Sir Dav[id]: Dalrymple, in a letter of 3 March, had asked Boswell to send him Brown’s Ode (i.e. The Cure of Saul), John Wesley’s Letter to … the Bishop of Gloucester (i.e. William Warburton), and an elegy called The Bee, by William Cleaver (1742–1815), all published this year, as well as Churchill’s The Ghost, first published in March 1762 but with an expanded edition in 1763. In a letter of 19 March, Dalrymple thanked him for The Bee, Brown’s Ode and Wesley’s Letter. Boswell did not send The Ghost, as it would have been too bulky and expensive, but sent at least the first book of it at a later point.
4. copy out fine: Again, copy letters for his volume.
5. My Lord: Eglinton.
1. Miss or Mrs. Brown: Evidently (from what Boswell says) Eglinton’s live-in mistress. She has not been further identified. According to a letter from Boswell’s wife, Margaret, Eglinton left her £200 a year in his will (1769).
2. so far: To a certain extent; up to a point.
1. wt. Sword: Fully and formally dressed, as a gentleman.
2. L[ove]’s … done: As will be seen in several later memoranda and journal entries, Boswell is trying urgently to recover the £40 he had earlier lent James Love.
3. Sir Dav[id]’s franks: Franks (from Eglinton) for Dalrymple, to cover the cost of his postage.
1. If morn[ing] bad: Boswell seems to have written this memorandum on the night of 11 March, after coming home from his depressing encounter with Lady Northumberland. His morning will indeed be ‘bad’.
2. Skeene’s: Possibly Lieutenant Colonel Robert Skene (1719–87) of Hallyards, of the 59th Foot, later MP for Fifeshire, and colonel of the 48th Foot from 1783. A cousin of Adam Smith. In January of this year he had been appointed Adjutant General for Scotland.
3. Buy something to Lady Anne: She and her sister Lady Betty are soon to leave London for Scotland.
4. blackest days … past: The immediate cause was doubtless the way he was treated ‘slightly’ by Lady Northumberland the night before. But he had been receiving letters from friends and family members in Scotland reporting his father’s displeasure and anger at him. He received a particularly anxious letter from his mother (dated 7 March) about this time: ‘[Y]ou need not doubt but it woud have given me Pleasure to have heard that you was Layving of London & thincking of Comeing home & Setling to Busness hear[.] I supos you have no Expectations new [i.e. now] of a Comision in the Gaurds & as you are folowing no other Busness I belive no Body woud thinck it reasonable or advise your Father after your year is out to Continou your Alouance to live idely at London[.] I know no young gentelman of this Country that lives ther in that way[.] [Y]our poor Father is stil in great distress about you[.] [Y]our showing A dislike at this Country is a thing very disagreeabl to him[;] however I hope you will Come to See that it is both your duty & intrest to Setel hear befor the End of this year’ (Yale C 332).
5. wanted: Lacked, needed.
6. fleet-ditch: Notorious portion of the Fleet (a tributary of the Thames, rising in the Hampstead hills), long used as a dumping ground for all kinds of waste, in effect a malodorous and disease-carrying open sewer.
7. [A]llanbank … haunted: The ancient mansion house of Allanbank, estate of the Stuart family of Allanbank, in Berwickshire, was long reputed to have been haunted by the ghost known as ‘Pearlin’ Jane’, a young Parisian woman, said to have been a jilted bride.
8. the silent watches: Of the night.
1. first experienced … rites of Love: With Sally Forrester, at the Blue Periwig (see the entry for 21 November 1762). Boswell is echoing a line of Erskine’s poetry: ‘To consummate the melting rites of love’ (‘The Pigs, An Elegy’, Collection II, p. 58).
2. Laird of Spotiswood: Walter Macfarlane’s half-brother, John Spottiswoode (1711–93), of Spottiswoode in Berwickshire. He was the son of Lady Helen Arbuthnot (1675–1741) – widow of Walter Macfarlane’s father, John Macfarlane (d. 1705) – and her second husband, John Spottiswoode (1667–1728), who had been professor of law at the University of Edinburgh and librarian of the Faculty of Advocates.
1. call Coutts & settle affair: Perhaps Boswell is consulting Coutts on either how to pay the debt to Orlando Hart or how to recover the money owed to him by Love, or both.
2. consider you save dinners: By not dining any more with the Kelly family and/or by dining at home all week on muffins (memorandum, 7 March).
3. recollect for Wednesday: Presumably, when he will go to Chandler’s to settle all about Letters E–B.
4. the Chieftain: That is, Macfarlane, Laird of Macfarlane (thus chief of the clan Macfarlane).
5. Halkerston’s Wynd & Whigs & Roundabouts: That is, back to hamely Edinburgh familiarity. Halkerston’s Wynd ran from the High Street to the New Port (i.e. gate). ‘Whigs’ (usually ‘wigs’ in England) were a ‘kind of small oblong currant bun’, and ‘roundabouts’ were ‘a circular roll made of coarse flour; a circular oatcake’ (Concise Scottish Dictionary). Boswell is probably calling to mind the kinds of ‘worst Edinburgh tea-drinking afternoons’ mentioned in his journal for 6 December.
6. Barnet: Eleven miles north of London, the first stage on the East Road back to Edinburgh.
7. english girl … France: Not further identified, and it is not clear whether Boswell met her at Eglinton’s or later.
1. Pitfour: James Ferguson (1735–1820), the eldest son of James Ferguson of Pitfour and Anne (Murray) Ferguson, sister of Lord Elibank. A young advocate, later MP for Banffshire (1789–90) and Aberdeenshire (1790–1820).
2. about Bill: Perhaps the £40 owed to Hart.
3. Mrs. Shaw, formerly Miss Thomson: Isabella (Thomson) Schaw (d. 1777), a young woman Boswell had met socially several times in Edinburgh in 1761–2. She had married Lieutenant Frederick Bridges (or Brydges) Schaw, of the 32nd Foot, in November 1762. He was the son of Dr William Schaw, who had been physician to George III’s father, Frederick, Prince of Wales (1707–51).
4. Mrs. Carwardin’s: Penelope Carwardine (1729–?1801), painter and miniaturist, in Rathbone Place, Soho. She married James Butler, organist and harpsichord teacher, on 26 May of this year.
5. published in The Scots Magazine: Boswell’s ‘An Original Letter, From a Gentleman of Scotland to the Earl of *** in London’, dated 25 September 1761, appeared in the Scots Magazine for that month (see Corr. 9, pp. 104–10).
6. old hock: A German white wine, Hochheimer, produced at Hochheim on the Mainz (though the term was often extended to other German white wines). Boswell had written happily of times when he and Eglinton ‘after a pleasant drive in the chariot from Ranelaugh, have sat down by ourselves in your dining-room, to an enlivening bottle of Old Hock, and, with all imaginable gaiety, have resumed [i.e. recapitulated] the adventures of the day – sometimes indeed the former night too, has dropt into the scale …’ (Corr. 9, p. 104). For Ranelagh, see the journal for 4 May and n. 4.
7. Lord Auchinleck: Boswell’s father and Bute were probably distantly known to each other. Lord Auchinleck’s letters to Boswell in July this year report cordial dealings in Edinburgh with Bute’s brother, James Stuart Mackenzie (d. 1800), who held several offices during Bute’s prime-ministership.
8. past tryals: Boswell had passed the Faculty of Advocates examination in civil law on 30 July 1762.
9. to be broke: Marching regiments, or infantry regiments of the line, had numbered 51 in 1755, and 123 early in 1763. With the Peace, regiments of recent formation were being ‘broken’, i.e. disbanded.
1. settle … will write: Boswell would rather write a letter to Bute himself than have Eglinton send the one just signed.
2. Sir Chaloner’s: Boswell’s playful name for Flexney’s printer, Samuel Chandler. Perhaps a jocular appropriation from Richard Challoner (1691–1781), Roman Catholic bishop and vicar apostolic in London, two of whose books (The Grounds of the Old Religion and The Touchstone of the New Religion, both in 1751 reprints) were in Boswell’s later library, and another of whose works, A Specimen of the Spirit of Dissenting Teachers (1736), had been written against certain Nonconformists, including the coincidentally named Samuel Chandler (1693–1766). Boswell may have had also in mind a well-known naval officer, Admiral Sir Chaloner Ogle (?1681–1750).
3. Shut up: Stay close at home, to finish work on Letters E-B.
4. to Advocate’s: Thomas Miller, the Lord Advocate.
5. Exhibitions of Pictures in the Strand: By the Society of Artists. At this exhibition George Romney (1734–1802) first attracted notice, with his prizewinning The Death of General Wolfe.
6. a Chophouse near the New-church in the Strand: Either the St Clement’s Chophouse mentioned in the journal for 4 and 9 April, or the New Church Chophouse mentioned in the memorandum for 23 March and the journal for 14 April.
7. the vapours: Another common term for depression or melancholy. In early medicine, ‘vapours’ were thought to be exhalations produced by the body’s internal organs (especially the stomach), with a consequent disturbing effect on the mind and emotions. By Boswell’s time the term was largely metaphorical.
1. William: Evidently a servant, or errand boy.
2. Mrs. Miller’s … Glasgow tongue: Margaret (Murdoch) Miller (1733–67), Miller’s first wife, was the eldest daughter of John Murdoch (1709–76) of Rosebank (on the left bank of the Clyde), a prosperous tobacco merchant and Lord Provost of Glasgow, and his wife, Margaret (Lang) Murdoch.
1. to put his name: Possibly meaning have ‘printed by Samuel Chandler’ appear on Letters E–B, as it duly did: ‘Printed by Samuel Chandler; for W. Flexney, near Gray’s-Inn-Gate, Holborn’. Critical Strictures … on Elvira did not specify a printer, having on its title page only ‘Printed for W. Flexney, near Gray’s Inn, Holborn’.
2. St. Clement’s: Probably St Clement Danes, now on a traffic island in the middle of the Strand, the only church outside the City of London rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire (completed 1682, with the steeple added in 1719).
3. Whitefield’s: George Whitefield’s Methodist chapel, or tabernacle, in Tottenham Court Road, built in 1756 and extended in 1760, seated over 7,000 people.
4. wax: Presumably sealing wax for his letters.
5. Durham yard shoes: Go to Durham Yard to pick up the shoes he had ordered from Edinburgh. Boswell told Johnston in a letter of 22 March, ‘My shoes are arrived. I shall have them in a day or two’ (Corr. 1, p. 62). Durham Yard ran from the Strand to the Thames.
6. the fall of Mortimer … Dedication: King Edward III, with the Fall of Mortimer (1690), by John Bancroft (1655–96), but often attributed to the actor William Mountfort (?1664–92). An anonymous version of it in 1731 as The Fall of Mortimer (a thinly veiled attack on Sir Robert Walpole) was declared by a Middlesex grand jury to be ‘seditious’. Wilkes, as part of his onslaught on Bute, had now published an adaptation of it, with an ironic mock-dedication to Bute, after having in the North Briton sarcastically ‘deprecated’ parallels between the Dowager Princess of Wales (mother of George III) and the play’s Isabella, the adulterous queen of Edward II (whose murder she procured); between her lover Roger Mortimer, Earl of March, and Bute; and between George III and Edward II, her 14-year-old son in whose name Mortimer and Isabella ruled. Slander at this time had often suggested an adulterous liaison between Bute and George III’s mother.
7. Guildhall: Off Cheapside, the offices of the civic administration of the City of London.
8. the Temple: That is, the Inner Temple.
9. very deep play: Intense high-stakes gambling at cards.
1. Penny for Seat: A penny to the attendant to hold a place for him in the church.
2. nothing … But what is broke: That is, no regiment stationed outside London except a disbanded one (so that he would not be put on active duty, or made to serve in a garrison overseas).
1. Leave Sir Francis’s Speech wt. Corbin: Unexplained. Perhaps the recent speech by, or something Boswell has written about, Sir Francis Dashwood (1708–81), MP at this time for Weymouth and Melcombe Regis, and Bute’s short-lived Chancellor of the Exchequer. (He was the founder of the whimsically irreverent ‘Franciscans’, with which Sandwich and Wilkes were also associated.) In his recent speech, Dashwood had presented a controversial Budget which (to help pay the huge costs of the war) increased tax on cider from 4s. to 10s. a hogshead – a move which proved highly unpopular, and provoked riots in the cider counties (such as Somerset). Another possibility is that Boswell has written something to do with the fictional Sir Francis Wronghead of The Provok’d Husband (mentioned in the entry for 20 January). ‘Corbin’ is unidentified, but is perhaps Corbyn Morris (1710–79), economist and author, who from 1751 to 1761 was secretary of the customs and salt duty in Scotland, and had just been appointed (15 March) to a post on the English Board of Customs in London. Boswell, in a footnote to the Life (p. 821), refers to him as ‘My old acquaintance’.
2. propose fairly: Perhaps, make an outright proposition to ‘Lady Mirabel’ that they become lovers.
3. in a young Corps: A regiment of recent formation, and thus likely to be disbanded.
4. If you get your Commission … Bargain: That is, ‘If you join a regiment of recent (wartime) formation, it will of course be disbanded (in the reductions following the Peace). If you join an older, established, regiment, you will find men now on half-pay willing to purchase your commission from you in exchange for theirs.’
1. What a curious creature … endued: Perhaps a distant echo of Hamlet’s ‘What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties …’ (II.ii).
2. Slaughter’s Coffee-house: Probably the one that came to be known as Old Slaughter’s, in St Martin’s Lane. A newer Young Slaughter’s was also in St Martin’s Lane.
3. Pitt: Pitt won further popularity for his opposition to the cider-tax provision in Dashwood’s Budget.
1. return tics … custom: Unclear. Perhaps Love gave Boswell theatre tickets in lieu of the money he owes, or in exchange for franks.
2. cause Dun … Map: Boswell has evidently acquired a map of London, which he now wishes to send Dun to pay for.
3. Sully’s Memoirs: The memoirs of Maximilien de Béthune, duc de Sully (1559–1641), French economic and military reformer under Henri IV, first appeared in a completed form in 1662. Boswell probably refers to the six-volume English translation by Charlotte Lennox (1730/1–1804), whom Johnson greatly admired. A third edition, in three quarto volumes, had appeared in 1761, and a fourth edition would appear later this year. Johnson had published a review of the work earlier, and was probably the author of its dedication. In journal notes in Holland (3 December 1763), Boswell will urge himself, ‘Hoc age [Latin, “Do the thing at hand”]: let that be your motto. Be like the Duke of Sully, always active’ (Boswell in Holland: McGraw-Hill, p. 80; Heinemann, p. 78).
4. catches: Short songs, ‘rounds’, in which voices singing the same words and melody successively take up the lines.
5. Catch-club: The Noblemen’s and Gentlemen’s Catch Club was founded by Eglinton, Sandwich and others, in November 1761, at the Thatched House tavern in St James’s Street, for the singing of catches, canons and glees. It awarded prizes for new compositions, and its songs were published annually by the group’s secretary, Edward Thomas Warren (d. 1794).
1. mark: Note in his expense accounts.
2. Fell at Cornhill &c: William Fell (d. 1763), china merchant, in Cornhill. Hart, the Edinburgh shoemaker, had endorsed Boswell’s bill to Fell, to whom Boswell thus had to go to pay it.
3. we lighten’d it: A first printed edition of The Discovery appeared a few days after its 3 February opening, and a second before the end of the year, which indicated ‘passages in the printed text’ that had been ‘left out of the acting version … The excisions shorten the play considerably, making for an acting script that is tighter and quicker in its movements’ (The Plays of Frances Sheridan, ‘Introduction’, p. 33).
4. Captain Erskine’s Odes to Indolence & to Impudence: Erskine’s Two Odes, to Indolence, and to Impudence were published by R. and J. Dodsley in 1762.
1. get Hume: Pick up the sixth and last volume of Hume’s History from Dempster.
2. My Lord: Eglinton.
3. Miss Wells: Another lady of the town.
4. Give nothing: Offer Miss Wells no money.
5. Sir John Brute: Roguish, drunken, abusive husband, the main character in Vanburgh’s The Provok’d Wife (1697). Digges had played the part on the Edinburgh stage several times, most recently in September 1762. The play ran this season at Covent Garden on 29 September and 12 January with Garrick in the role, and on 28 January, 7 February and 12 March with Woodward. The part was another of Garrick’s most celebrated, and one in which Zoffany had painted him (the painting hangs now in the Wolverhampton Art Gallery).
6. Armour … dull satisfaction: The ‘Armour’ (for which term see n. 8 for 25 November) is doubtless the condom he acquired from Mrs Phillips at the Green Canister (memoranda for 5 and 8 December).
1. send for ode: Probably the Ode to Tragedy, which Boswell mentioned (intending to leave it for Sheridan) in his memorandum for 30 December. Perhaps his meaning here is that (having just been told by Sheridan that neither he nor Erskine is a poet: journal for 24 March) he would like it back.
2. rust of Antiquity: An expression from the Memoirs … of Martinus Scriblerus, the work of mock or faux learning by the Scriblerus Club – mainly Arbuthnot. In ch. IV, the learned Dr Cornelius, shocked to discover that the maid had inadvertently cleaned the patina from his old shield (on which he wished, in imitation of the legend of the infant Hercules, to exhibit his newborn son), asks the assembled to pray instead ‘that the Rust of Antiquity … may be added to my son; and that so much of it as it is my purpose he shall contract in his Education, may never be destroy’d by Modern Polishing’ (Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works, and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus, ed. Charles Kerby-Miller (New York: Russell & Russell, 1966), p. 105).
1. St. Dunstan’s: Either St Dunstan in the East, between the Tower of London and London Bridge, or St Dunstan in the West, in Fleet Street. The latter is much closer to Boswell’s lodgings, and to Erskine’s residence near Leicester Street.
2. push Shawfield: Shawfield is probably Daniel Campbell (1736–77) of Shawfield, MP for Lanarkshire. Perhaps Boswell is thinking of an approach to him via Dempster (‘D’) for help with his Guards commission.
3. Berkeley: Not identified. If a person (rather than a place), a possibility is Norborne Berkeley (1718–70), at this time MP for Gloucestershire, a Bute supporter and a groom of the bedchamber (in which capacity he would doubtless have been known to Eglinton). He vacated his seat in April, and made a successful claim to the Botetourt peerage. As the 4th Baron Botetourt, he was governor of Virginia from 1768.
4. a tribe of dismal Relations: Perhaps members of the Ogilvie family of Balfour (Dempster’s mother’s family) or more probably of the Hamilton family, relatives of Dempster’s stepmother, Margaret Hamilton (née Stewart). Dempster’s half-brother John (‘Jack’) Hamilton Dempster (1750–1800) later became an East India Company captain.
1. Der[rick]: Samuel Derrick (1724–69), Irish author, with whom Boswell kept company during his 1760 London escapade.
2. if Witch must be taken out: Boswell is wondering whether to include or exclude Erskine’s ‘The Witch’, a 16-line poem (possibly a song), which had appeared in Donaldson’s Collection II. It did not in the event appear in Letters E–B.
3. bring him down: Presumably to meet Derrick.
4. former times in London: In 1760 Derrick had introduced Boswell to literary and theatre people, among them Garrick and Davies, and had promised to introduce him to Johnson (but did not manage to bring the meeting about). But he also introduced Boswell to London’s more raffish side. Derrick ‘was my first tutor in the ways of London, and shewed me the town in all its variety of departments, both literary and sportive’ (Life, p. 239; 28 July 1763). Boswell’s original and more revealing wording was ‘… its variety of departments both literary & licentious’ (Life ms 1, p. 318). In his Hebridean journal he wrote (but later cancelled), ‘I … was initiated by Derrick, the poet … in the knowledge of the town in all its varieties of wits, players, ladies to which he could attain’ (27 Aug. 1773; Hebrides, p. 416). Boswell, regarding himself as much improved in character, morality and maturity over what he was in 1760, is plainly repenting of this association. Later this year in Holland, having received a letter there from Samuel Johnson (‘the greatest honour you could ever imagine you could attain to’), he will make a pointed contrast: ‘Look back only three years when you was first in London with Derrick’ (15 Dec. 1763; Boswell in Holland: McGraw-Hill, p. 92, Heinemann, p. 90).
5. Master of the ceremonies at Bath: Derrick succeeded James Collet (Jacques Colet) – who had succeeded the famous Richard ‘Beau’ Nash (1674–1762) – in January of this year as Master of Ceremonies in the fashionable resort towns of Bath and Tunbridge Wells.
6. lives well: Cochrane resided in the house here that had first served as the Coutts bank, which had recently moved to 59 Strand.
7. his wife: Lillias (Stuart) Cochrane, of the Stuart of Allanbank family; an aunt of James and Thomas Coutts (her sister Jane married Provost John Coutts, the Couttses’ father).
1. Mark Advertisement: Correct the text of the ‘Advertisement’ to Letters E–B. The volume’s brief ‘Advertisement’ (p. iii) began, ‘Curiosity is the most prevalent of all our passions; and the curiosity for reading letters, is the most prevalent of all kinds of curiosity’ – perhaps in part indebted to Johnson’s Rambler 103, which opened, ‘Curiosity is one of the permanent and certain characteristicks of a vigorous intellect’ (12 Mar. 1751). The ‘Advertisement’ ended, ‘They [i.e. the letters] have made ourselves laugh; we hope they will have the same effect upon other people.’
2. Tilt: The Tilt-yard Coffee House, off Whitehall, much frequented by army officers. Boswell wrote to Johnston this day, ‘I am to dine with Captain Webster and a parcel of young lively English fellows at the Tilt-yard’ (Corr. 1, p. 63).
3. order money: Explained in the entry for 1 April.
4. consult about inject[ion]: Boswell is evidently again contemplating a urethral injection from Andrew Douglas, anxious about another venereal infection, probably because of sex with Elizabeth Parker (even though ‘in Armour’) on 25 March. Ober notes that Douglas in his treatment for Boswell’s infection in January did not at that time ‘recommend instillation of medication into the urethra by syringe’ (Ober, Boswell’s Clap, p. 7).
5. Sir Alexander Jardine: Jardine (1712–90) was 4th Baronet of Applegirth in Dumfriesshire. He had converted to Roman Catholicism, and been elected one of the Knights of Malta.
6. Colonel Cæsar of the Guards: Colonel Julius Caesar (d. 1762), major general in the Coldstream Guards. He had commanded two Guards battalions in the allied army under Prince Ferdinand of Brunswick, and was killed in August 1762 in a fall from his horse in Germany.
1. take out — from pot & put up in paper: Boswell’s ‘—’ refers to his condom, which (if Molly, the Terries’ maid, is not about) he wishes to take out of its pot and wrap in paper (presumably to carry about with him, given what is recorded in the entry for 31 March).
2. happy: On or about this day, Eglinton told Boswell that his approach to Bute had indeed resulted in the offer of an ensigncy in a marching regiment, in a note from Bute to Eglinton dated 26 March. Boswell told Johnston (5 April) that ‘I am now resolved to accept of an Ensigncy in a marching Regiment, and to exchange it immediatly with a half-pay one, and so have that pretence to push for the Guards [meaning that he would exchange his ensigncy with an officer on half-pay (that is, not on active service) but, having secured a commission, would stand a better chance of transferring to a Guards regiment]. Lord Eglintoune advised me to take it’ (Corr. 1, p. 65). But he does not proceed with this plan, reporting himself overpowered in the end by awareness of his father’s deep displeasure, and admitting that he had wanted only a commission in the Guards.
3. Colonel Maxwell of Kingsleys: Lieutenant Colonel John Maxwell, of the Maxwell of Calderwood family, officer in the 20th Regiment of Foot, whose proprietary colonel was Colonel (later Major General) William Kingsley (d. 1769). Maxwell, along with other officers and men in this regiment, had fought with famous distinction at the Battle of Minden (1 August 1759).
1. Good friday: Boswell has headed his memorandum with the drawing of a cross.
2. This being … of much advantage: Good Friday, like Christmas (for which see the journal for 25 December and n. 1), was not particularly commemorated in the Scottish Kirk. Boswell was in London in Holy Week during his first escapade in 1760, when he took Communion in the Roman Catholic Church, but does not record what Good Friday ‘Ceremony’ he may have seen, or learned of, in the Church of England or the Catholic Church then. He reports in a later journal that he first saw the Catholic Mass celebrated in 1760 in the chapel of the Bavarian envoy (2 Apr. 1775; Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–1776, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill; London: Heinemann, 1963), p. 114). Pottle notes that ‘English law proscribed the Roman faith for Englishmen, but of course could not interfere with the religious observances of the official representatives in England of Catholic sovereigns, who maintained … chapels of their own. In them mass was said publicly, these chapels in fact serving as mission churches for English Catholics in London’ (Earlier Years, p. 573). The Anglican Book of Common Prayer for 1763, after three special Good Friday collects, specifies a reading from Hebrews 10 (‘The law having a shadow of good things to come …’) for the Epistle, and the account of the Passion from the Gospel of St John, ch. 19 (‘Pilate therefore took Jesus and scourged him …’) for the Good Friday services. The Catholic The Divine Office for the Use of the Laity of 1763 specifies for Good Friday a lengthy selection of prayers and readings from the Bible, and describes a Good Friday ‘Mass of the Presanctified’ – a Mass at which the priest’s consecration of the bread does not take place (since this day commemorates the day on which Christ died), but in which ‘the Priest … communicates of the bread, which was consecrated at the Mass of yesterday’ – i.e. the Maundy Thursday Mass (vol. 3, p. 100).
Boswell long retained feelings such as those recorded in this journal entry. At home in Edinburgh fourteen years later he noted in his journal, ‘This being Good Friday, I read in my copy of the Scottish Common Prayer Book’ – that is, the Scottish Book of Common Prayer, which appeared first in 1637 (during the reign of Charles I) and which was used by Episcopal Scots (Boswell had recently purchased a copy of it at an auction). He reported himself ‘uneasy that I had not a proper opportunity for attending public worship as in England’, and regretted – not wishing to be ‘a dissident from the form of my country’ – that he could not join those who even in Scotland (worshippers in the ‘qualified’ chapels which followed Church of England procedures) ‘keep holy the days which commemorate the great events of Christianity’ (28 Mar. 1777; Extremes, p. 103).
1. or E—: Presumably, Erskine’s.
2. the Monument: This freestanding stone Doric column, a short distance from the northern end of London Bridge, designed by Wren and Robert Hooke (1635–1703) and built in 1671–7 to commemorate the Great Fire, stands 202 ft high. An interior spiral staircase leads to a balcony at the top.
3. When I was … foundation: Boswell’s experience here closely resembles that of the rustic young Squire Richard, son of Sir Francis Wronghead, who recounts his London sightseeing experiences in Cibber’s The Provok’d Husband: or, A Journey to London (for which see journal for 20 January, and n. 7). (Richard speaks in a version of a Yorkshire accent.)
MYRTILLA: Well, and pray what have you seen, sir?
SQUIRE RICHARD: Flesh, I cawn’t tell, not I – seen everything, I think. First there we went o’ top o’ the what-d’ye-call-it there, the great huge stone post, up the rawnd and rawnd stairs that twine and twine about, just an’ as thof it were a corkscrew.
MYRTILLA: Oh, the Monument. Well, and was it not a fine sight, from the top of it?
SQUIRE RICHARD: Sight, miss? I know no’ – I saw nowght but smoke and brick housen, and steeple tops. Then there was such a mortal ting-tang of bells, and rumbling of carts and coaches, and then the folks under one looked so small, and made such a hum and a buzz …
MYRTILLA: I think, master, you give a very good account of it.
SQUIRE RICHARD: Aye, but I did no’ like it; for my head, my head, begun to turn – so I trundled me dawn stairs again like a round trencher.
(Act IV, ll. 77–95)
1. Redhead &c: Unexplained.
2. in Temple: The Inner Temple, where Temple is lodging.
3. Call Blair … wt. him: The Rev. Hugh Blair had now come to London, as he had told Boswell he planned to do in his letter of 19 February (see n. 4 to 31 January).
4. His Father’s affairs … shame & distress: Temple’s father, William Temple (d. 1774), once a prosperous burgess of Berwick and a landowner who had twice been mayor, had become bankrupt, and in 1762 lost his post in the Customs Service (he had been appointed collector of customs at Berwick in 1742). Temple had inherited Allerdean, the estate (about 4 miles from Berwick) of his mother, Sarah (Johnston) Temple (d. 1747), in 1760.
5. the Clergyman in the Spectator: The chaplain of the fictitious Worcestershire baronet Sir Roger de Coverley in the Spectator essays ‘is a person of good Sense and some Learning, of a very regular Life and obliging Conversation’. Sir Roger, ‘afraid of being insulted with Latin and Greek at his own Table’, had sought out ‘a Clergyman rather of plain Sense than much Learning, of a good Aspect, a clear Voice, a sociable Temper, and, if possible, a man that understood a little of Back-Gammon’. His chaplain has all these endowments, and is ‘a good Scholar though he does not shew it’. He ‘has now been with me thirty Years; and … has never in all that Time asked anything of me for himself, tho’ he is every day solliciting me for something in Behalf of one or other of my Tenants, his Parishioners’ (Addison, Spectator 106, 2 July 1711).
6. the Church service: Perhaps the Easter service in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. It involved a special set of morning prayers – ‘Christ our passover is sacrificed for us …’ (1 Corinthians 5:7), ‘Christ being raised from the dead …’ (Romans 6:9), and ‘Christ is risen from the dead …’ (1 Corinthians 15:20), and an Easter collect (‘Almighty God, who through thine only begotten Son Jesus Christ, hast overcome death …’). The Epistle (‘If ye then be risen with Christ, seek those things which are above …’) was Colossians 3:1–7, and the Gospel, John 20 (‘The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early …’).
1. Leave word … in: Leave word with the Terries to let Temple be admitted.
2. easy visiting & no vails: Boswell wants to be seen as a familiar visitor at ‘Lady Mirabel’s’, without needing to provide vails (what would now be called tips) for the servants.
3. J. Home: The Rev. John Home (1722–1808), Church of Scotland clergyman, and playwright, best known for his tragedy Douglas (1757). He was now private secretary to Bute. Boswell had met him during his first London visit in 1760.
4. Charles Douglas: Charles Douglas (d. 1770), of the East India Company, was an uncle of William Douglas of Kelhead (who became his heir in the estate of Breconwhat, Dumfriesshire). Boswell met him at Kelhead during his Harvest Jaunt, and noted in his diary that he ‘had been twenty-five years abroad in the East Indies and has made a fortune of £20,000 … [H]e has a house in London and is to be there next winter …’ (6 Oct. 1762; Jaunt, p. 70).
5. Sir Roderick: Sir Roderick McKenzie, 4th Baronet of Scatwell, was at this time an ensign in the 3rd Foot Guards, and the future husband of Katherine (‘Kitty’) Colquhoun (see the journal for 30 November and n. 10).
6. Captain Archibald Erskine: Erskine (1736–97) was the second of Andrew Erskine’s two older brothers, and would succeed Thomas Erskine as 7th Earl of Kellie in 1781. At this time he was a captain in the 115th Regiment of Foot (the Royal Scotch Lowlanders).
1. they: Boswell does not specify who ‘they’ are; possibly the two Erskine brothers, or possibly Hugh Blair and William Nairne (for whom see the journal for 9 April and n. 5).
2. Buy pair spotted silk: Evidently new stockings, perhaps to wear to the ‘levee’ at the Sheridans’ the next day.
3. for Bill: Boswell wrote to Johnston this day that he paid his bill to Orlando Hart ‘this morning’, and enclosed the bill in the letter (Corr. 1, pp. 65–6).
1. get 3 doz: Three dozen franks from the Lord Advocate, Miller.
2. diced stockings: Chequered in a pattern of squares or diamonds.
3. Sir J: Sir James Macdonald. He will write back to Boswell from Oxford on 14 April a pleasant letter confirming his invitation to visit (Corr. 9, p. 398).
4. bencher: ‘One of the senior members of the Inns of Court, who form for each Inn a self-elective body, managing its affairs, and possessing the privilege of “calling to the bar” ’ (OED).
5. Minister in the Cannongate: Blair served in the Canongate Church for eleven years from 1743 (when Boswell would have been 2 or 3 years old), before being called in 1754 (when Boswell was 14) to Lady Yester’s Church, then to the New (or High) Kirk in St Giles in 1758.
6. the stool of Repentance: A stool or chair in church in which the offender was required to sit, facing the congregation, and in some cases to receive the rebuke of the minister.
7. moderate hand: Blair had written to Boswell from Edinburgh in his letter of 19 February, ‘I long to see Mrs Sheridans Comedy, which I don’t hear is come down [i.e. to Edinburgh] yet; Though by the Extracts from it which I read in the London Chronicle, I am not greatly prepossessed in is favour. Dont you think the Genius both of Comedy and Tragedy seems to languish greatly amongst us at present?’ (Yale C 156).
8. consistent character: The Hamlet seen by mid-eighteenth-century theatregoers was an adaptation that derived from the acting texts of the earlier part of the century used by the main Hamlets of that time, Thomas Betterton (1635–1710) and then Robert Wilks (c.1665–1732), especially the version as altered by Wilks and John Hughes, first published in 1718, and usually referred to as the ‘Hughes–Wilks’ Hamlet. Several minor characters and many major speeches and scenes were omitted, and scenes were reordered, making for a much shorter and more swiftly moving play than Shakespeare’s. Garrick’s acting text (which Colman allowed to be published later in 1763 while Garrick was absent in Europe) was his own adjustment of the Hughes-Wilks version. (For George Colman see the journal for 6 May and n. 2.) Garrick would alter the play much more substantially in 1772, restoring many Shakespearean scenes, lines and characters, though even this one remained a shorter and reordered version of Shakespeare’s play.
9. clearly and justly: Theatre audiences in Ireland, England and Scotland much admired Sheridan for his distinctive portrayal of Hamlet, which some commentators preferred over Garrick’s. Boswell himself (see n. 1 for 30 December) had praised Sheridan’s acting in the part in his Ode to Tragedy. Sheridan’s account as here recorded by Boswell amounts to a notably original engagement with period debates about Hamlet following the publication in 1736 of Some Remarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (anonymous, but attributed to Sir Thomas Hanmer (1677–1746)), which had faulted both the play’s structure and the title character for implausibilities, especially in the feigned madness and the revenge-plot delays. Sheridan’s focus on the psychological character of Hamlet (rather than on the action of the acting-text version of the play), and his account of Hamlet as ‘studious’, ‘contemplative’, and thus ‘delicate & irresolute’, anticipates some elements of the later (and now better-known) influential assessments made by Henry Mackenzie (1745–1831) in his essays in The Mirror (April 1780), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749– 1832) in his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) in his ‘Lectures’ on Shakespeare (1818).
10. Whately a Lawyer: Probably Joseph Whately (d. 1797), who received his LLB in 1753, and was at this time delivering a series of public lectures on rhetoric in Gresham College. He later took holy orders and became rector of Widford and prebendary of Bristol. One of his brothers, Thomas Whately (1726–72), barrister of the Middle Temple, from 1760 recorder of St Albans, and now MP for Ludgershall, was soon to become private secretary to Bute’s successor, George Grenville (1712–70), and in October of this year would be appointed Secretary to the Treasury. Their brother William Whately (d. 1782) was a banker with whom Sheridan was doing business in 1766.
1. leave tickets with landlord: Possibly tickets to the opera Artaxerxes (for which see 9 April, n. 4), which Boswell plans to see with Hugh Blair.
1. Taylor: Lieutenant Colonel William Taylor (or Tayler) (d. 1793), later with the army rank of lieutenant general, of the 71st Foot, Andrew Erskine’s regiment.
2. Clifton’s Chophouse: In Butcher Row, the Strand.
1. get account: Unexplained. Perhaps an account of Bute’s resignation, which took place on 8 April. He was succeeded by Grenville.
2. Dash’s march: Erskine’s regiment had been ordered to St Albans, in Hertfordshire, 22 miles north of central London, where it was to be disbanded.
3. dry muff[in]s: That is, muffins without butter. In one of his French-practice ‘Themes’ in Holland, Boswell compares what is served with tea or coffee for breakfast in various different places, and says (translated from Boswell’s French), ‘In Switzerland you have hot cakes well covered with butter. In London you have muffins, which are much the same thing, or sometimes butter-toast, that is, bread and butter toasted together. Sometimes you are given bread, either toasted or not, and left to put the butter on it yourself’ (Yale M 87, c.20 Mar. 1764).
4. Napier: Perhaps William Napier (1730–75), lieutenant colonel in the 2nd Dragoons (Scots Greys), who had been appointed deputy adjutant general of the forces in Scotland on 17 January; in 1773 he succeeded as 7th Lord Napier of Merchistoun.
5. Artax[erxes]: Arne’s only attempt (a popular success) at a full-length English opera modelled on the Italian, based on the well-known Artaserse (1730) by Pietro Metastasio (1698–1782). The part of Mandane was played by Charlotte Brent, and the part of the villain Artabanes by Beard. It had opened at Covent Garden on 2 February 1762. The 24 February 1763 performance had been marred by a disturbance by the ‘half-price’ rioters, who demanded the return of the traditional right to enter at the third act for half price.
6. Nairne: William (later Sir William) Nairne (c.1731–1811), Edinburgh advocate, raised to the bench as Lord Dunsinane in 1786.
7. Thomas and Sally … applause: Thomas and Sally, or, the Sailor’s Return, by Bickerstaffe, with music by Arne, was a popular musical afterpiece first performed in November 1761. The playbill lists the part of Dorcas as being played by a ‘Gentlewoman, 1st appearance on this stage’. Boswell’s diary here confirms that she was Mrs Love, anonymously making her first stage appearance at Drury Lane – a fact which helps explain his readiness to pass up Artaxerxes with Blair and Nairne at Covent Garden to see Thomas and Sally. (James Love acted in the mainpiece at Drury Lane this night, playing Sir Epicure in Jonson’s The Alchemist.)
1. Murray Broughtoun: James Murray of Broughton. The intended letter or letters to Murray (mentioned again in the memoranda for 27 and 28 April) have not survived. As well as, or instead of, Boswell’s own hopes and plans, they may well have concerned his wish to assist William McQuhae (of whom Boswell had said in his journal entry for 26 February, ‘I hope to make him tollerably happy’). McQuhae was ambitious to have a parish appointment, and (since the death of his young pupil James Reid in December) had been anxious about his future. He had mentioned Murray, who was lay patron of St Quivox parish, in a letter to Boswell of 27–30 December 1762, and would do so again in a letter of 26 April: ‘Mr Murray very readily on the first application promised to present me to St Quivox … Your friendship I never doubted. For your assistance in the present case, I return you many thanks from a really grateful heart’ (Corr. 9, p. 407). Murray presented McQuhae in August of this year, and he was ordained in March 1764.
2. to Sr. James to go down next week: Write to Sir James Macdonald about accepting his invitation to Oxford. Perhaps the fact that Letters E–B was soon to appear has influenced Boswell’s decision to accept the invitation, so as to be out of London for a while.
3. Monday senight: A week from Monday, i.e. 18 April. Love’s benefit performance was to be on Friday 15 April. Boswell wrote to Johnston on 5 April, ‘Love cannot give me the money till his benefit is over. Lazy dog that he is. I wish I had my money’ (Corr. 1, p. 66).
4. the Temple-church: This ancient church, with its rare circular nave, was built first by the Knights Templar in 1185.
5. Set thy house … die: ‘In those days was Hezekiah sick unto death. And the prophet Isaiah the son of Amoz came to him, and said unto him, Thus saith the Lord, Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live’ (2 Kings 20:1; Isaiah 38:1).
6. Tom’s: Tom’s Coffee House in Russell Street, Covent Garden.
1. spelt thus: He was closer to being right in the journal entry for 15 March.
2. Lord Lieutenant to Ireland: The King’s viceroy in Ireland (in which capacity Northumberland would serve until 1765). The appointment was reported in the newspapers of this day (though Boswell may have heard the news from Eglinton).
3. Aid de Camp: The Lord Lieutenant was entitled to aides-de-camp in his role as titular head of the army in Ireland.
1. our Letters: The first reference in the journal itself to Letters E–B.
1. Captain Archibald: Erskine. But the journal entry shows that Boswell does not breakfast with him.
2. Call Donaldson & give him franks: The franks are no doubt to help Alexander Donaldson defray the postal costs associated with copies of Letters E–B to be sold in Edinburgh.
3. D’s: Presumably Dempster’s.
4. a parcel of the letters: On 17 May Boswell will write to Johnston that ‘Donaldson has sent a parcel [i.e. of Letters E–B] to Edinburgh’ (Corr. 1, p. 75).
5. the Spectator’s: ‘The incantations in Macbeth have a solemnity admirably adapted to the occasion of that tragedy, and fill the mind with a suitable horror’ (Steele, Spectator 141, 11 Aug. 1711).
6. Holland: Macbeth had opened on 17 January with Garrick playing the title role, but Charles Holland (1733–69) took over in the 17 March performance.
7. A—: Arse.
1. Stuart & Webster: Which ‘Stuart’ is not known. But in the event Boswell does not breakfast with either man.
2. wt. friend: Boswell now contemplates trying the army for a short time, then taking up life in the Inner Temple with a friend (probably meaning Temple).
3. an abstract: See Appendix III, ‘History of Erskine and Boswell’s Letters’.
4. Lady Margaret Hume: Lady Margaret Hume (c.1740–65) was the daughter of the Earl of Marchmont and his first wife, Anne Western (d. 1747). Later this year (20 September) she married Major General James Stuart of the family of Stuart of Torrance. Boswell had met her on his Harvest Jaunt, and gave a similar description of her then: ‘very ugly, but clever and snappish’ (18 Oct. 1762; Jaunt, p. 86).
1. hear accounts: Perhaps of Letters E–B, from people at Flexney’s.
2. then play: Then go to the play (but the journal entry suggests that he did not). The performance at Drury Lane this night was 2 Henry IV, the benefit for Love (who played Falstaff). More intriguingly, since Boswell had seen this play already (on 10 January), and since he mentions the ‘Piazza Coffeehouse’, he may have been contemplating the play this night at Covent Garden, Farquhar’s The Constant Couple, or, A Trip to the Jubilee (1699), in which the part of Lady Darling was being played by Anne Lewis.
3. Marchmonts … or rather: The line is left incomplete. In fact he does not call (on Lady Margaret Hume, at her father, Lord Marchmont’s) on Sunday, a matter he will recall guiltily in his journal entry for 20 May.
1. Johnston: Boswell wrote to Johnston this day with the news of Letters E–B: ‘And now Johnston, I must inform you that Captain Erskine and I have published a Collection of our letters, with the utmost boldness too, as we have printed our names at length. The narrowminded and censorious Scotch rail at us. The good-humoured jolly English like and praise us. To be sure it is a whimsical enough Experiment. I am affraid only of my Father’s displeasure. He will think it terribly imprudent’ (Corr. 1, p. 70). Boswell’s prediction about his father’s response would prove accurate. Lord Auchinleck will write to him next month, ‘When I went on my circuit to Jedburgh I received a fresh mortification, the news were brought to me and therein was contained an account of the publishing some Letters of Yours and one of them was insert as a specimen[.] I read it and found that tho’ it might pass between t[w]o intimate young Lads in the same way that people over a bottle will be vastly intertained with one anothers Rant, It was extreamly odd to send such a peice to the press to be perused by all and sundry[.] The Gentlemen at Jedburgh imagined and indeavoured to perswade me that it had been somebody who put in that Article in the news by way of Jest[,] for they could not suspect the Letter to be genuine[.] At the same time they said it was a cruel Jest as it was exposing you’ (30 May 1763; Yale C 214). Hugh Blair, writing to Boswell (on 16 July 1763, after returning to Scotland) of conversations with Lord Auchinleck in which he tried to give ‘the most favourable representations’ of Boswell’s ‘life and Conduct’, said he found that ‘still there was displeasure,’ because of among other things ‘the foolish Publication of Letters’ (Yale C 157).
2. téte a téte: Correctly, tête-à-tête.
1. the Tower: The Tower of London. The visit here is explained in the journal entry for 18 April.
2. Dodsley & make him buy: Perhaps, try to persuade James Dodsley to buy some stock of Letters E–B to sell.
3. the Parson: The Rev. John Wills (?1707/8–65), who had been vicar at St Bride’s for twenty years.
1. Put lett[er] to Public, in Penny Post: Send a letter by the Penny Post to the Public Advertiser, in which there had appeared a favourable review of Letters E–B. The purpose and the consequences of this letter appear in the journal entry for 24 May.
2. leave letter at North[umberland] House: Boswell transcribes this letter to Lady Northumberland into the journal for 22 April.
3. tickets to Mrs. Gould and Mrs. Douglas: What these tickets from Eglinton are is not explained.
4. the landing of the Venetian Ambassadors: Tomaso Querini (1706–d. after 1763) and Francesco Lorenzo Morosini (1714–93), ‘Ambassadors Extraordinary from the most Serene Republic of Venice’, had been in London since June 1762, and were now making their grandiose ceremonial public entry. They were received this day at Greenwich by Frederick North (1732–92), 2nd Earl of Guildford (later prime minister, 1770–82), and Sir Charles Cottrell-Dormer (d. 1779), Master of the Ceremonies, accompanied ‘by six Gentlemen of His Majesty’s Privy Chamber, and from thence [were] brought by Water, in His Majesty’s Barges, to the Tower’ (Public Advertiser, 2 May 1763). They were received there by John Berkeley (1697–1773), 5th Baron Berkeley of Stratton, constable of the Tower. A spectacular and numerous procession then followed, which included ‘forty of their Excellencies’ Footmen, in very rich Liveries, two and two’, to Somerset House, where they were entertained for three days. They had a public audience with George III in the Great Council Chamber at St James’s Palace on 21 April.
5. name-sake … better acquainted: William Bosville (1745–1813), eldest son of Godfrey Bosville (1717–84), of Gunthwaite, near Wakefield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and Diana (Wentworth) Bosville (1722–95). He was commissioned lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards sixteen months earlier. He later served as a captain in North America 1776–7, left the army after his father’s death, and became well known as a hospitable bon vivant. Boswell would meet Godfrey Bosville in 1766, and come to regard him as the Boswell family ‘chief’ (though on rather dubious genealogical grounds). William’s sister (Elizabeth) Diana Bosville (1748–89) married Sir Alexander Macdonald in 1768.
1. his wife: Anna (Marshall, or Merchall) Donaldson (1726–92), daughter of an Edinburgh merchant. She married Donaldson in 1751, and had three sons, only the eldest of whom survived: James Donaldson (1751–1830), printer, newspaper proprietor, and a director of the Bank of Scotland, who left his fortune to fund Donaldson’s Hospital for destitute children, in Edinburgh, built in the mid-nineteenth century.
1. Oxford Inn & take place for friday: Go to the Oxford Arms inn, Warwick Lane, and book a place in the coach leaving from there for Oxford on Friday. But (as the entry for 22 April shows), Boswell changes his plan, stays at the Blue Bell and Crown inn, Holborn, Friday night, and takes a coach from there on Saturday.
1. L[ove]’s & take ticks: The tickets he is taking to or from Love are not explained.
2. to Reynolds: Reynolds’s studio, where he exhibited pictures, adjoined his home in Leicester Square.
3. Keep Boswelliana: Boswell reminds himself to keep jotting amusing anecdotes and clever sayings, by himself and others, in his ‘Boswelliana’. He had begun this separate notebook on 20 September 1762, and he would continue to make entries for another twenty-five years. An edited and bowdlerized version was published as Boswelliana, the Commonplace Book of James Boswell, with a Memoir and Annotations, by the Church of Scotland clergyman and historian Rev. Charles Rogers (1825–90), in 1874. The original manuscript is now in the Hyde Collection, Houghton Library.
4. Write on lett[er]s for Lond Chron: Boswell indeed wrote his own (naturally laudatory) review of Letters E–B for the London Chronicle in the 26–28 April 1763 issue, pp. 404–5. ‘Upon the whole,’ he declared, ‘we would recommend this Collection as a Book of true Genius; from the authors of which we may expect many future agreeable productions.’
5. as good lett[er]s: Boswell’s review for the London Chronicle concluded, ‘And although the cynical part of mankind may accuse [the authors] of vanity, yet we will venture to say, that there are few people who would not have been equally vain, had they written letters of equal merit.’
1. go to Inn & lie: This second option is the one he will choose for his departure for Oxford. The coaches of the Oxford ‘coach-master’ Mr Kemp put up at the Blue Bell, and ran to and from the Angel inn, Oxford.
2. compleated: One of Northumberland’s aides-de-camp was John Francis Erskine (see 29 November 1762 and 2 February 1763).
3. three blue beans in a blue bladder: Mere empty noise; a proverbial expression, perhaps originally a reference to a child’s, or jester’s, toy rattle.
4. Annui: Correctly, ennui.
1. Hawkins … Mr. Smith near Oxford: Probably Thomas Hawkins (?1728/9–72), who had matriculated at New College in 1746 and had been chaplain (not as Boswell thinks a fellow) at Magdalen from 1754. His The Origin of the English Drama, Illustrated … by specimens from our earliest writers; with explanatory notes appeared posthumously in 1773. But another man of the same surname, Richard Hawkins (?1705–65), had been a chaplain at Magdalen, from 1729. The ‘Mr. Smith near Oxford’ has not been identified.
2. Doctor Smith … Physician: John Smith MD (1721–97), from Maybole, Ayrshire, matriculated to Balliol in 1744, took his DMed from St Mary Hall in 1757, and was from 1766 Oxford’s Savilian Professor of Geometry. Boswell would meet him again on a visit to Oxford in 1768, when ‘I went and found him just as he was in 1763 when poor Sir James Macdonald made me acquainted with him, only he was now become a professor and had a very elegant house … He is a great foe to Johnson and an admirer of Hume, but can bear my admiration of Mr. Johnson very well’ (27 Mar. 1768). A year and a half later on another visit, Boswell noted that ‘It was very agreeable to see a Maybole man a professor at Oxford’ (9 Sept. 1769). (Wife: McGraw-Hill, pp. 150, 285; Heinemann, pp. 161, 303.)
3. Mr. Pepys … Mr. Foote: Macdonald has assembled an impressive group of Oxford students for Boswell to meet. Each would later rise to eminence. Mr. Pepys: William Weller Pepys (1740–1825), later (from 1801) Sir William, 1st Baronet; lawyer, author and literary scholar. (Boswell errs in giving him a Devonshire origin.) He took his BA this year and MA in 1766, was called to the Bar that year, and became a Master in Chancery in 1775. Mr. Cornwallis: James Cornwallis (1742–1824), later (1823) 4th Earl Cornwallis, graduated BA in June of this year, took an MA from Merton in 1766, and intended a career in the law before, on the advice of his uncle, Frederick Cornwallis (1713–83), archbishop of Canterbury, he chose the Church. From 1781 he was bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, then dean of Windsor (from 1791) and dean of Durham (from 1794). Mr. Edin: William Eden (1744–1814), later a statesman, penal reformer and diplomat. He took his BA in 1765 and MA in 1768. Called to the Bar (Middle Temple) in 1768, he became MP for New Woodstock (1774–84) and Heytesbury (1784–93). He published his The Principles of Penal Law in 1771. Undersecretary of State (1772–78), Lord of Trade (1776–82), Commissioner for Conciliation with America 1778–79, envoy to France (negotiating commercial and trade treaties) 1785–88, ambassador to Spain 1788–89 and to the United Provinces 1789–93, joint Postmaster General 1798–1804, and President of the Board of Trade 1806–7. He would be created Baron Auckland (an Irish peerage) in 1789, and Baron Auckland of West Auckland (in the British peerage) in 1793. Mr. Foote: George Talbot Hatley Foote (1745–1821), not of Christ Church but of St Mary Hall (as Boswell notes, correcting himself, in his 25 April journal entry). From 1769, a barrister of Lincoln’s Inn.
4. blue boar inn: At the corner of Blue Boar Lane, an old and well-known inn at Oxford at this time.
1. wrote a few letters: Miserable ones. To Johnston he wrote (in a letter dated 25 April) that the ‘entertainments and civilitys which I receive are a burthen to me; and I am anxious till tomorrow morning comes when I shall get into the Coach and drive back to dear comfortable London’ (Corr. 1, p. 72). To Temple, ‘I must write without being able to say any thing. Melancholy clouds my mind, I know not for what. But I resemble a room where somebody has by accident snuffed out the candles’ (Corr. 6, p. 34). He wrote also to his avuncular friend James Bruce, the Auchinleck overseer (but this letter has not survived).
2. Isis: The upper course of the Thames, above and around Oxford.
1. the Theatre: The Sheldonian Theatre, in part of the grounds of the Bodleian Library, adjacent to Broad Street, built 1664–8 to designs by Wren, funded by donations from Archbishop Gilbert Sheldon (1598–1677), the university’s chancellor in 1677 (and formerly bishop of London and archbishop of Canterbury). Not actually a theatre (in the sense of a playhouse), but the site of the university’s major public meetings and ceremonial events.
2. Mr. Shepherd … ideas of them: Richard Shepherd (?1732–1809), later DD; theologian and poet. He matriculated at Corpus Christi College in 1749, and was appointed probationary fellow there in 1760. He took orders in the Church of England, became Bampton Lecturer at Oxford in 1788, and served later as chaplain to Thomas Thurlow (1737–91), bishop of Lincoln (later of Durham), then as archdeacon of Bedford, and rector of Wetherden and Helmingham, in Suffolk. His Odes Descriptive and Allegorical had appeared anonymously in 1761, as had The Nuptials: A Didactic Poem, in Three Books (a second edition of The Nuptials in 1763 identified the author as ‘Mr. Shepherd’). The excerpts of the Odes that Boswell read had appeared in the Scots Magazine of February 1761.
3. Mr. Thomson: Samuel Wells Thomson (c.1740–78), of Christ Church, took his BA in 1762 and MA in 1765. He became a deacon two months after this meeting with Boswell, and was ordained in 1764. Later (1766–8), he was a Lee mathematical lecturer at Christ Church, a Whitehall preacher (1766), and a fellow of the Royal Society (1770).
4. Pembroke College … was educated: Whitefield entered Pembroke (where he first became acquainted with the Wesleys) as a servitor in 1732, and took his BA in 1736. James Hervey (1714–58), who had been with the Wesleys in the Holy Club at Oxford, was a Church of England clergyman of a Calvinist cast and a devotional writer, whose Meditations and Contemplations had first appeared in 1746–7. Boswell wrote in a later journal that Hervey’s Meditations ‘were the delight of my dear, pious mother, and engaged my affections in my early years’ (24 Oct. 1773; Hebrides, p. 349). In his letter to Johnston of this date Boswell mentions also that he ‘yesterday looked at the Windows of Mr. Locke’s room, and of Mr. Addison’s room in which he wrote the most of his Saturday’s papers’ (Corr. 1. p. 72). Locke was in Christ Church, and Addison in Magdalen College.
5. Mr. Smith: Adam Smith.
6. Fortuna non parta labore: Latin, ‘a fortune not the result of labour’ (i.e. inherited). Slightly adapted, or misquoted, from Martial’s Epigram x.47.3: ‘res non parta labore, sed relicta’. Johnson had quoted this line in his Rambler 203 (25 Feb. 1752), where he translated it as ‘an estate not gained by industry, but left by inheritance’.