1. Mr. Head: Richard Head (c.1743–77), of Orcheston, St George, Wiltshire, took his BA (Hertford College) in 1762, and MA (Oriel College) in 1765, and was from 1766 a barrister of the Middle Temple.
2. Mr. Crisp: Probably Samuel Crisp, of the firm listed in contemporary directories as ‘Samuel Crispe and Company’, merchants, in Pall Mall.
1. D— Hume: That is, he plans to read Hume’s History this night.
2. Mrs. Corrie at Col. Douglas: Mrs Corrie (not mentioned in the journal) is not certainly identified. Colonel Stuart Douglas (d. 1795), brother of Charles Douglas (of the Kelhead family), served in the 108th Foot (disbanded this year), and rose later to the rank of lieutenant general.
1. take Satires … in writing: Possibly the satires of The Cure of Saul mentioned in the entry for 26 February. The ‘account of lett[er]s’ is probably the record of responses (see Appendix III) to Letters E–B, to show Erskine.
2. Blair for Museum: Boswell and Hugh Blair are planning a visit to the British Museum (see entry for 6 May), which, originating in 1753 with the collections of Sir Hans Sloane (d. 1753) and augmented soon after with other valuable archives such as the collections of Robert Harley (1661–1724), Earl of Oxford, first opened to the public, in Montagu House in Bloomsbury, in January 1759. Arranging tickets in this early period was a complicated matter. Written application had to be made in advance, and approval provided by the principal librarian, and tours were conducted under strictly regulated guidance.
3. Doug[las]: Surgeon Andrew Douglas.
4. now come: Back from St Albans, where his regiment was disbanded.
1. Buy another Chronicle: Probably the London Chronicle with his own review of Lettters E–B in it.
2. as when confined: Be as disciplined about reading and journal-keeping as he was when confined by his illness.
3. be clear ’gainst Saturd[ay]: Keep Saturday clear (to go as usual to Child’s, and to buy the next issue of the North Briton).
4. By no means … Misery: Do not return to unhappiness in Edinburgh.
5. Houstoun Stewart: Houston Stewart Nicolson (1741–86). (Born Houston Stewart, he took the surname Nicolson on succeeding to the estate of Carnock in 1752.) Boswell and Erskine had been friendly with him in Edinburgh, and he too had contributed items to Donaldson’s Collection II.
1. more electuary: Boswell presumably needs ‘more electuary’ from Douglas because he had ‘clogged’ his ‘faculties’ (entry for 25 April) with dinners at Oxford.
2. Captain Cordwell: Henry Cordwell (d. ?1795), commissioned lieutenant in the 107th Regiment of Foot (the Queen’s Own Royal Regiment of British Volunteers) in October 1761.
3. Turk’s head Coffee-house: One of several of the name.
1. till after review: Perhaps (given what Boswell says in the journal entry for 2 May), until after notices of Letters E–B have appeared in the Critical Review or the Monthly Review.
2. & Landlady up: Boswell does not specify why he wishes to see Mrs Terrie this night. Perhaps it is to bring his payments up to date (as mentioned in the two preceding memoranda).
3. his brother … the Royal Volunteers: Robert (‘Bob’) Temple (1747–83) was commissioned lieutenant in December 1761 in the 85th Foot, the ‘Royal Volunteers’ (whose proprietary colonel, John Craufurd, was mentioned in Boswell’s conversation with Lady Northumberland of 10 January). At this time, Robert (baptized 19 July 1747) was about two months from his fifteenth birthday. He continued in military service, and died in action in India.
4. Captain Blair: Probably John Blair (d. 1772) of Dunskey, commissioned ensign in the 3rd Foot (‘Scots’) Guards in 1759. His mother was Eglinton’s cousin. According to a letter from Johnston of 10 March, ‘Captain Blair’ had been recruiting in Scotland, was on his way to London with forty recruits, sent his compliments to Boswell, and was to arrive ‘in 3 weeks’ (Corr. 1, p. 58).
1. just queue: Presumably, with his hair queued (in a single braid).
2. the story: Perhaps the story of the secret planning and publication of Letters E–B.
3. Great Day … read: He expects to see reviews of Letters E–B, in both the Critical Review and the Monthly Review.
4. be at Lear, solus: Boswell will go to see Garrick in King Lear (which he wishes to see alone, ‘solus’) on 12 May. A scheduled 5 May performance was cancelled because of celebrations to mark the Peace.
5. Johnston the Advocate: William Johnstone (1729–1805), later Sir William Johnstone Pulteney (taking the surname Pulteney in 1767 when his first wife, Frances Pulteney (d. 1782), succeeded to the estates of the Earl of Bath); MP for Cromartyshire (1768–74) and for Shrewsbury (1775–1805), and, from 1794, 5th Baronet of Westerhall. At this time an advocate in Edinburgh, and a friend of Hume, Smith and others in literary circles (from 1762 he was secretary of the Poker Club). He was a brother of Captain George Johnstone (mentioned in the entry for 5 January).
1. to tower & see Show: The release of Wilkes from the Tower, a scene which attracted a great crowd. Wilkes had been taken into custody for the North Briton no. 45, of 23 April, which had attacked the King’s speech from the throne, on 19 April, on the Peace treaty, calling its references to the Peace ‘the most abandoned instance of ministerial effrontery ever attempted to be imposed on mankind’, thus implying that the King had countenanced a lie in reading it. He was to be taken this day before the Court of Common Pleas.
2. King Charles days: The Tower of London figured prominently in the struggles that led to Cromwell’s overthrow of Charles I. The King fought to retain control of it, and his principal adviser, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford (executed in 1641), and the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud (executed in 1645), had been imprisoned here. After the Restoration of his son Charles II in 1660, several of the regicides were imprisoned in the Tower before execution, and Charles himself spent the eve of his coronation here in April 1661.
3. except to Little house in park: Meaning unclear. Perhaps a reference to a place for meeting a prostitute.
4. Cassilis: Another Ayrshire nobleman, Sir Thomas Kennedy (d. 1775), of Culzean, 9th Earl of Cassillis, a title to which he had recently succeeded after legal disputes over claims to it with William Douglas, Earl of March.
5. Newgate: London’s main prison, squalid and crowded, in Newgate Street, in which prisoners could be spoken to, and indeed were popular to visit. It was pulled down and rebuilt 1770–78 to designs by George Dance (James Love’s brother).
6. Mr. Rice the Broker: John Rice (d. 1763), a broker, had forged power of attorney after losing large sums of money in stock speculation. Forgery at this time was a capital offence.
7. Paul Lewis for Robbery & Hannah Diego for theft: Lewis (1740–63), son of a Sussex clergyman, had been an officer in the naval service, had seen action, but had begun stealing and turned a violent armed highwayman. Hannah Diego (the name is more usually given as Dagoe) was, according to the report in the May 1763 Newgate Calendar, born in Ireland and worked as a basket-woman at Covent Garden. She was tried at the Old Bailey and convicted of burglary – robbing the home of one Eleanor Hussey, a ‘poor and industrious woman’ of her acquaintance. (Newspaper accounts of the scene of execution describe how she struggled violently with the hangman on the scaffold.)
8. just a Macheath: Not just Boswell’s perception, but part of Lewis’s self-display. According to the Gentleman’s Magazine for May 1763, ‘When this gentleman [i.e. Lewis] came to Newgate, where he was well known, he was honoured with the title of captain, and he thought fit to assume the character of Captain Macheath: he shewed his gallantry and his wit by singing bawdy songs and abusing the parson’ (p. 210).
9. He was drest … cock’d: This description accords closely with an account of Lewis at his execution the next day: ‘He was dressed in a lightish sort of coat, and wore a flapped silver-laced hat’ (London Evening Post, 4 May 1763).
1. the lives of the Convicts: Boswell refers again in his entry for 6 July to his having read the ‘The lives of the Convicts, and other such Books’. Criminal or ‘rogue’ biographies – that is, lives of notorious robbers, murderers, pirates, prostitutes and so on, often with accounts of their trials, confessions, speeches and (if they were, as was most often the case, capitally condemned) dying words – were highly popular with the reading public throughout the century. A ‘correct perspective of eighteenth century biography cannot be attained until it is realized that [criminal] careers resulted in more biographical compliations that did the lives of most statesmen, scientists, artists, or benefactors of mankind’ (Donald A. Stauffer, The Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century England, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), vol. 1, p. 206). Boswell’s wording suggests such compilations as A Select and Impartial Account of the Lives, Behaviour and Dying-Words, of the Most Remarkable Convicts, from the year 1700, down to the present time, which appeared in a second (‘corrected and enlarged’) edition of three volumes in 1745, and in a two-volume edition as recently as 1760.
2. Tyburn: London’s public gallows, near the site of what is now Marble Arch, about 2 miles from Newgate. The capitally condemned were publicly carried here from Newgate in a cart for their execution.
3. crowd of Spectators: Hangings were notorious popular public spectacles, often (as on this occasion) attracting huge crowds. The crimes and the trials of these three malefactors had been covered in detail in the press. The St. James’s Chronicle and other newspapers of this day reported that ‘There was the greatest Number of People present ever known on the like Occasion.’ Because of the often dangerous disorderliness of such crowds of spectators, the Tyburn gallows were demolished in 1783 and executions moved to a site near Newgate itself.
4. Ranelagh: Fashionable pleasure gardens, in Chelsea, east of the Royal Hospital. They opened in 1742, offering competition to the older Vauxhall (for which see 31 May, n. 3). They featured a striking rotunda, or amphitheatre, designed by William Jones (d. 1757) for ridottos (assemblies with music and dancing), 150 ft in diameter, with a central stage for an orchestra and two tiers of fifty boxes around the walls.
5. Baron: Hugh Barron (1747–91), painter (later apprenticed to Reynolds) and a talented amateur violinist, at this time about 15 years old.
1. C-House: Probably Clifton’s Chophouse.
1. Confinement: After Wilkes had been taken from the Tower on 3 May to appear before the bar of the Court of Common Pleas, the hearing was not completed that day. He was offered release on bail, which he declined to provide, and so was sent back to the Tower. He was discharged this day on the grounds of parliamentary privilege.
2. Colman the Author of the Jealous Wife: George Colman the elder (1732–94), dramatist, theatre manager and author. He started the Connoisseur with Bonnell Thornton (for whom see the journal for 24 May, and n. 3) in 1754. His popular comedy The Jealous Wife was first produced (and acted in) by Garrick in February 1761, was having a successful run in the current season, and would be produced almost every year for the rest of the century. Colman took over Garrick’s part of the Drury Lane management in the 1763–4 season, when the Garricks travelled to France. He was later a member of the Club, and in 1784 was one of the pallbearers at Johnson’s funeral.
1. Payne’s: Not identified.
2. Nannie: Not identified. Boswell mentions plans in several later memoranda to ‘try’ to ‘make love’ to her.
3. The immense Donaldson: Boswell regularly refers to Donaldson as ‘immense’ and ‘great’ because, presumably, of his ambitious publishing plans and achievements.
4. fleet-market: Food market occupying the bridge on the covered-over portion of the Fleet Ditch, between Fleet Street and Holborn.
1. have Chetwynd to read: Have Chetwynd read to him.
2. Audley chapel: Either Grosvenor Chapel, in South Audley Street, Mayfair, or the Audley Street Chapel.
3. a Romish Chapel: Probably the chapel of the Portuguese ambassador, in South Audley Street, at Golden Square.
4. Lord Thanet & Abel: Sackville Tufton (1733–86), 8th Earl of Thanet and Baron Tufton, and Karl Friedrich Abel (1723–87), German-born musician and celebrated player on the viola da gamba, for which he composed much music. Abel had the greater part of his career in London, was one of the most prominent musical figures of the period, and became chamber-musician to Queen Charlotte. His friendship with J. C. Bach led to the famous ‘Bach and Abel Concerts’ in London soon after this time.
1. Foote: Samuel Foote (1720–77), actor, theatre manager, popular comedian and mimic, who produced and acted in summer theatre in the Haymarket. This reference to him is explained in the entry for 10 May.
2. charcoal: Probably for the fire in his room.
3. your friend: Temple.
1. stay out year: Presumably, stay in London for a full year (but his plan changes).
2. Douglas’s: This Douglas, like the ‘Douglas’ mentioned in the memoranda for 29 and 30 April and 9 May, is either Colonel Stuart Douglas or Charles Douglas.
3. laugh at his Orators very heartily: Foote’s farce The Orators was first produced in 1762. Part of Boswell’s delight is no doubt owing to the fact that one of its satiric targets was Thomas Sheridan.
4. Mr. APrice the original Cadwallader: Thomas Hussey Apreece (d. 1777), upon whom Foote’s character of Cadwallader (a caricature of a pedigree-conscious Welshman) was based in his farce The Author (1757), which Foote had put on in Edinburgh in early 1759 and again in April 1760.
5. Edifice: The bridge, it should be noted, had alcoves (to shelter pedestrians in case of rain).
1. Miss Watts: An annually published guide to the ‘Ladies of Pleasure who frequent Covent-Garden and other Parts of this Metropolis’ – Harris’s List of Covent-Garden Ladies: or, New Atalantis, compiled at this time by Derrick – notes (in its 1764 issue) a ‘Miss W-tts’ in Russell Street, another in Charles Street, Covent Garden, and another at Glastonbury Court, Long Acre. One of the three may be this woman.
1. King Lear: The final performance of this play for the season (Boswell had wanted to see the play as early as 19 November). The title role was one of Garrick’s most rapturously admired throughout his career.
2. a proper frame: That Boswell particularly wanted to experience the play alone is clear from his memorandum for 2 May, ‘be at Lear, solus’. Boswell had noted while watching The Discovery that ‘I could have wished my two Companions absent from me, as they brought down my ideas’ (journal for 3 February).
3. tears: The King Lear Boswell saw was the heavily revised version by Nahum Tate (1652–1715), The History of King Lear, first produced in 1681, but with Garrick’s restorations of certain portions of Shakespeare’s text (begun in 1756 and later increased) that Tate had removed or rewritten. Tate voided the play of its tragedy, replaced it with elements of love, adventure, sentiment and pathos, eliminated the part of the Fool, and introduced a love between Edgar and Cordelia and a plot in which Edmund seizes Cordelia (along with her confidante, Arante, a character added by Tate), whom Edgar arrives to rescue. Tate returned to the play a happy ending (present in Shakespeare’s main source story), which Garrick retained: Cordelia and Edgar marry and live on to rule over the kingdom, while Lear, Kent and Gloucester live on in reflective retirement. Versions of the play indebted to Tate were the only ones acted on the London stage for about a century and a half (with the tragic ending restored at Drury Lane in the 1820s, and the part of the Fool in 1838).
4. Polly Honeycomb: A hugely popular afterpiece by Colman, introduced by Garrick in the 1760–61 season.
1. begin Hume: Begin the sixth and final volume of Hume’s History, which Boswell had for some time been urging himself to borrow from Dempster and read.
2. Obrien the Player: William O’Brien (d. 1815), a popular young Drury Lane actor, working under Garrick’s direction. He played the part of Sir Harry Flutter in Frances Sheridan’s The Discovery.
3. Shop: At 195 Strand, corner of Arundel Street, where Donaldson had set up his business with his brother John.
4. Lincoln’s Inn … Colman: Colman had entered Lincoln’s Inn in 1755, was called to the bar in 1757, and practised for a time on the Oxford circuit, but he gave up the law to be a man of letters and of the theatre.
5. the charitys at Edinburgh: Plays at the Canongate were often produced by request of and for the benefit of various charities, but the plan described here was not fulfilled.
6. Mr. Nichols: Norton Nicholls (?1742–1809) was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1760. He took holy orders in the Church of England in 1767, and served as rector of Lound and Bradwell, in Suffolk. A close friend and correspondent of Thomas Gray.
7. Helvetius … Rousseau: Helvetius: Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–71), French author and philosopher. His De l’esprit had appeared in 1758. Voltaire: Pseudonym of François-Marie Arouet (1694– 1778), French poet, philosopher, satirist and dramatist. Rousseau: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), political theorist and philosopher. His Du contrat social, ou principes du droit politique appeared in 1762. Boswell would meet both Rousseau and Voltaire while on his tour of Europe in 1764.
1. Ludgate-church: St Martin within Ludgate, on Ludgate Hill, rebuilt by Wren after the Great Fire, and opened in 1684.
2. Dr. Fordyce’s meeting in Monkwell Street: James Fordyce DD (1720–96) was an Aberdeen-born Church of Scotland minister, famous for his eloquent sermon oratory. It was Fordyce who, according to Boswell’s Life, introduced Hugh Blair to Johnson at about this time, and brought up the question of the Ossianic poems. Blair’s asking Johnson whether he thought ‘any man of a modern age could have written’ the poems of Ossian provoked the disparaging response, ‘Yes, Sir, many men, many women, and many children’ (Life, p. 210; 24 May 1763).
3. the Dissenters: In this context, a Church of Scotland congregation worshipping in England (where the Church of England was the established Church).
4. Mr. Claxton: John Claxton (d. 1811), later a barrister and antiquarian. Admitted to Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in 1757; called to the Bar in 1766. His friendship with Temple continued, and Temple later named one of his sons, John James Temple (1776–1800), after Claxton and Boswell.
1. not too laughable: Boswell’s advice to himself about how to behave when breakfasting with the Temple brothers.
2. Piazza: The Great Piazza coffee house in Covent Garden.
3. take Letter … fast: Take to Pringle a letter he has written to his father. Boswell told Johnston in a letter of 17 May, ‘My Father’s displeasure hangs over me; the airy forms of gayety and pleasure that glittered before my fancy are vanished or hid in clouds of discontent … I have written a most warm letter to my Father and told him that if he can have no peace of mind unless I return to Scotland that I will make that sacrifice, but have beg’d him to allow me some years in my own way, and then I may more effectualy settle. Doctor Pringle is to write to him to let me try the Army’ (Corr. 1, p. 75). He asked also for Dalrymple’s help in these negotiations with his father in a letter of 21 May.
4. G. D. Georges: Perhaps, meet Dempster at George’s Coffee House (there were several of the name).
5. his mortal antipathy at the Scotch: Boswell does not specify which particular examples of Johnson’s well-known ‘antipathy’ he has in mind. His journal of 4 November 1762 (when he and Erskine visited Hume) reports that he heard from Hume that Johnson ‘is a man of enthusiasm and antiquated notions, a keen Jacobite yet hates the Scotch’ (Jaunt, p. 103). Boswell may have heard more of Johnson’s critical opinions of Scotland and the Scots from Sheridan.
6. sore eyes … the King’s evil: Johnson wrote to his stepdaughter Lucy Porter (1715–86) on 5 July, ‘I have had an inflammation in my eyes, but it is much better, and will be, I hope, soon quite well’ (Letters of Samuel Johnson, vol. 1, p. 222). Johnson was plagued by poor vision and various forms of recurring ocular pain and distress for most of his life. By ‘the Palsy’ Boswell probably means the fact that Johnson’s (very large and ungainly) body often shook with odd tics and tremors. The ‘King’s evil’ is scrofula (a tubercular infection of the cervical lymph nodes, which it was thought in the earlier part of the century could be cured by a royal touch). Johnson contracted it in infancy, and it had seriously damaged his vision and hearing. When he was two and a half years old, his mother had brought him to London to be touched by Queen Anne. His face remained scarred from this disease, as well as from the smallpox he suffered when young.
7. well ducked: ‘Ducking’ was a medieval punishment by public humiliation in various forms (not common in the eighteenth century but not entirely obsolete), often performed on a ‘ducking-stool’ – ‘a sort of chair at the end of an oscillating plank, in which disorderly women, scolds, or dishonest tradesmen, were tied and ducked or plunged in water, as a punishment’, in a ducking-pond, ‘a pond for the ducking of offenders’ (OED).
8. tædium vitæ: Latin, ‘weariness of life’.
9. at Bath: Sheridan was at this time reading lectures on his favourite subject, oratory, at Bath.
10. doubt: Suspect, fear.
1. my Barber fell sick: Meaning that Boswell could not be shaved and have his hair dressed to look his best for the rout.
1. Exhibition: Of paintings, sculpture, prints and other works at the Society of Artists of Great Britain, in the Great Room in Spring Gardens, Charing Cross. (See the journal for 23 May.)
2. risque: The risk of another bout of venereal disease (just run with Alice Gibbs).
3. Baldwin: Either Henry Baldwin (1734–1813), proprietor of the St. James’s Chronicle, or one of three booksellers with the surname in Paternoster Row: Robert Baldwin (1737–1810), Richard Baldwin (1691–1777) and Richard Baldwin Jr (1724–70). Boswell, as a co-proprietor of the London Magazine from the autumn of 1769, would become closely associated with Robert Baldwin (its publisher), Henry Baldwin (its printer) and briefly the younger Richard Baldwin (one of the other co-proprietors). Henry Baldwin would become Boswell’s printer for his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and the Life of Johnson.
4. Fitzgerald: Possibly Robert Villiers Fitzgerald, an Irish army captain, appointed this month to the rank of captain in the East India Company, with command of the 300 men of an EIC regiment he had raised.
1. large note to Wilkie … the Scratch: John Wilkie (d. 1785), bookseller in St Paul’s Churchyard, publisher of the London Chronicle and the Lady’s Magazine, had been the London publisher of Boswell’s Observations … on … Foote’s … The Minor in 1761 (it had appeared in Edinburgh in 1760), and later published Boswell’s Dorando (1767) and other writings in connection with the Douglas Cause. The ‘Epigram … Scratch’ is Boswell’s three-stanza ‘Verses: On reading ERSKINE and BOSWELL’S Letters’ (whose last two lines are ‘… Erskine and Boswell have shewn that the Scots / Can tickle as well as they scratch’), part of his puffing campaign for Letters E-B; the poem would appear anonymously in the Public Advertiser of 22 June.
2. to see Johnson: Thomas Johnson (d. 1785), celebrated trick rider. He was to perform this evening and the next at the Star and Garter tavern, Chelsea. (See the journal for 10 June.)
3. Break[fast] Gar[rick] when Pub: appears: Breakfast with Garrick (who had earlier praised the Critical Strictures on … Elvira) when the Public Advertiser comes out. Boswell gives himself a similar reminder on 23 May, and again on 26 May. Boswell advises himself to breakfast with Garrick when the Public Advertiser of 23 May appears, as it will carry a letter-essay by Boswell (Signed ‘B.’ of ‘Westminster’) which has some incidental praise of Garrick: ‘B.’ has such ‘Eagerness to be present at [Garrick’s] Performances’ that he overcomes his ‘strongest natural Passion’ – a timorousness, and his fears of nocturnal London.
4. his brother: Thomas Coutts (1735–1822), who had taken main responsibility for the bank after James Coutts had become MP for Edinburgh in 1762. He afterwards took sole charge, and with later partners brought the bank to great profitability and prestige in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
5. Mr. Trotter[,] Upholsterer: John Trotter, upholsterer or upholder (that is, furniture maker and supplier), in Frith Street, Soho.
6. an american Lady … Lord Minto’s: Elizabeth (Plumsted) Elliot (?1735–99), second wife of Andrew Elliot (1728–97), third son of Sir Gilbert Elliot MP (1693–1766), 2nd Baronet of Minto, and his wife, Helen (Stuart) Elliot (1696–1774), of the Stuart of Allanbank family. She was a daughter of the prominent Philadelphia businessman William Plumsted (1708–1765) – who had three times been mayor of Philadelphia (and was a founder of the college that became the University of Pennsylvania) – and his first wife, Rebecca (Kearney) Plumsted (?1695–1741). Andrew Elliot had left Scotland in 1746 and become a prosperous merchant in Philadelphia. While visiting Britain at this time, he was appointed collector of customs for New York, where he would move in 1764. He served later as lieutenant governor of the province of New York, took the loyalist side in the War of American Independence, returned with his family to Scotland in 1783, and in 1790 declined an offer to serve as British minister to the United States.
7. Mr. Stewart … Provost of Edinburgh: Archibald Stewart (1697– 1780), MP for Edinburgh 1741–47. As Lord Provost of Edinburgh in September 1745, he failed to organize a defence of the city, so that Prince Charles Edward and his army of Jacobite supporters entered unhindered. Stewart was arrested in December of that year, imprisoned in the Tower till January 1747, released on bail, charged with neglect of duty, but found not guilty after a lengthy trial in Edinburgh in November 1747. He thereafter transferred his prosperous wine business to London, and lived hospitably at 11 Buckingham Street, Strand.
8. Miss Rutherfoord … long in America: If the eldest of the Rutherford sisters, then Jean Rutherford (d. 1820), Andrew Elliott’s niece, daughter of his sister Eleanor (Elliott) Rutherford (d. 1797) and Major John Rutherford (1712–58) of Edgerston, MP for Roxburghshire 1732–42. In 1771 she married William Oliver (1738–1830) of Dinlabyre. Her father had moved to America, where he was Commissioner for Indian Affairs 1742–52 and member of the council of New York 1744–58. He died in action at Ticonderoga.
9. the Shakespear: The Shakespeare’s Head tavern, Covent Garden.
10. Youth’s the season: ‘Youth’s the season made for Joys’, Air XXII from The Beggar’s Opera, sung by Macheath in a tavern near Newgate prison, surrounded by ladies of the town.
1. Lord Loudoun: John Campbell (1705–82), 4th Earl of Loudoun, in Ayrshire, at this time colonel in the 30th Foot (Boswell’s brother John’s regiment) and a Scots representative peer. He had been Governor General of the colony of Virginia, and commander-in-chief of the forces in North America 1755–7.
2. Mrs. Wattman: Probably Sarah (Stanley) Whatman (1744–75). In October 1762 she married the papermaker James Whatman the younger (1741–98), who had just inherited his parents’ celebrated papermaking plant at Turkey Mill on the river Len in Kent. She was the eldest daughter of Edward Stanley (1718–89), at this time Clerk of the Fines, and from January 1767 secretary to the Commissioners of Customs, and Catherine (Fleming) Stanley (1726–d. after 1746).
3. engaged to do: See the memorandum for 15 April and n. 2.
1. I resolved … admired: Boswell wrote to Dalrymple from Temple’s rooms in the Inner Temple this day (describing Temple as a very intimate friend and a ‘sober and a grave man’), asking Dalrymple to help with the bad relations between himself and Lord Auchinleck (National Library of Scotland MS 25295, ff. 3–4v). Sir David, in a letter of 30 May, will reply that ‘I am sorry to find by yours of the 21st of May that your father & you are not on good terms. I wish I could be of any use between you … but to tell you the truth I do not so clearly apprehend your ideas of life as to be able to make your father relish them.’ Boswell spoke in his letter this day of his ‘independent spirit’ and his wish not to ‘hang on like a young Laird’. Dalrymple replied that the ‘thing you want is an object, & untill you have some object be it what you will, you must hang on, like a young laird upon every trifling amusement, as dependant and as little your own master as in that state which you ludicrously describe.’ Dalrymple urged Boswell out of the ‘condition of an idle man’. ‘If you can inform me that you desire to distinguish your talents in any course of life be it what it will, I will not fail to use my best endeavours to incline your father to your purpose’ (Yale C 1421).
1. Skiffnesh Bundle: Unexplained. Perhaps the parcel of Letters E–B to be sent (by sea) to Edinburgh.
2. about Girl: Consult surgeon Douglas, presumably about the risk of disease just run with Alice Gibbs.
3. review: Probably the review of Letters E–B in the Critical Review (see the journal for 1 June).
4. St. Andrew’s Church … glass: St Andrew, Holborn, survived the Great Fire, but being in a poor state of repair was nonetheless extensively renovated by Wren, in 1686. Above the carved altarpiece is a large Palladian window in two storeys, containing in stained glass the scenes of the Last Supper and the Ascension. The window commemorates John Thavie, who at his death in 1348 left property to maintain this church ‘forever’.
5. young Stewart[,] nephew to Douglas: George (later Sir George) Stewart (1750–1827), son of John (later Sir John) Stewart of Grandtully (1726–97), and Clementina Stewart (d. 1789). He matriculated to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1769, became a Scottish advocate, and was later admitted to Lincoln’s Inn. He succeeded as 5th Baronet of Grandtully in 1797. (He is nephew to young Douglas of Douglas.)
1. the pink: Probably the ‘plain suit of a pink colour’ which he reported acquiring in his entry for 3 December.
2. old Ersk[ine]: James Erskine, husband of Lady Frances.
1. Pie in room: Explained in the journal entry for 25 May.
2. & never street: Never again have sex with a streetwalker (but, as will be seen, he lapses).
3. Mr. Thornton … the Connoisseur: Bonnell Thornton (1724–68), journalist and author, who with Colman and others founded, wrote for and edited the Connoisseur (a literary magazine modelled on the Spectator and Tatler of Addison and Steele) from 1754 to 1756. His rooms were in Bow Street, Covent Garden. Thornton was at this time closely involved in writing for and editing the Public Advertiser.
4. the Criticism … so favourably of us: Thornton’s pleasant (anonymous) review of Letters E–B appeared in the Public Advertiser issue of 15 April, with more remarks and extracts in the issues of 19 and 28 April. ‘This is a Collection of Letters that passed between two Gentleman of Scotland, intimate Friends. They are written in quite the Gayete de Cœur [correctly, gayeté de cœur: French, “light-heartedness”], are for the most part very sprightly, and abound with that Sort of extravagant Fancy, which is very pleasing’ (15 Apr.). ‘Having already made Extracts of Mr. Erskine’s Letters, it would be an Injustice to Mr. Boswell not to pay the same Compliment to that Gentleman, as the Reader will perceive, that his Merit in Epistolary Writing, is not at all inferior to that of his Friend’ (28 Apr.).
5. his Father … Physic: John Thornton, a successful apothecary, expected his son to be a doctor (bred him ‘to Physic’).
6. Lloyd: Lloyd was a friend (from Westminster School days) of Churchill, Colman and Thornton. These four, along with some others including the poet William Cowper (1731–1800), were members of what they called the Nonsense Club, which met regularly from about the mid-1750s and produced much irreverent, satiric, facetious as well as serious politically polemical poetry, drama and journalism.
7. Johnson … courteously: Boswell added in the Life that a ‘few days’ after the meeting of 16 May ‘I called on Davies, and asked him if he thought I might take the liberty of waiting on Mr. Johnson at his Chambers in the Temple. He said I certainly might, and that Mr. Johnson would take it as a compliment’ (Life, p. 210). In his draft of the Life he noted also that he was shown in this day by Johnson’s Jamaican-born attendant (and eventual residuary legatee) Francis (‘Frank’) Barber (c.1742–1801), with whom Boswell later became friendly, and who would become a valuable source and informant for the Life (Life ms 1, p. 273).
8. verily they have their reward: ‘Verily I say unto you, They have their reward,’ an expression used by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, in the context of denouncing religious hypocrisy, before and after the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:2, 5, 16).
9. Grotius: Hugo Grotius (Latinized form of Huig de Groot) (1583– 1645), Dutch jurist and statesman. His treatise De Veritate Religionis Christianae (1627) was translated into English as The Truth of the Christian Religion.
10. Doctor Pearse on Miracles: Zachary Pearce (1690–1774), from 1756 dean of Westminster and bishop of Rochester. He published The Miracles of Jesus Vindicated in 1729, replying to the writings of Thomas Woolston (1668–1733), who had challenged literalistic (in favour of allegorical) readings of the accounts of Christ’s miracles.
11. Doctor Clark: Samuel Clarke DD (1675–1729), theologian, doctrinal controversialist, philosophical writer, and translator of Homer and Caesar. Boswell took this Johnsonian advice very seriously. He studied Clarke’s writings with ‘diligence and satisfaction’ when he arrived in Utrecht, and in a letter of 9 November 1763 he recommended Clarke’s A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God (1705–6) to Temple, who, still at Cambridge and having been advised by Gray to become a clergyman, was himself having doubts about Christianity (Corr. 6, pp. 74–7). Boswell ‘earnestly’ recommended Clarke’s work to Johnston in a letter of 20 January 1764: ‘It has given me very strong conviction of the truth of Christianity, which is a continual support to the soul. When a man has once the hope of celestial Joy, he is above the little vexations of this state: At least he supports them with patience’ (Corr. 1, p. 118).
12. Morris: Robert Morris (1744–93), later a barrister and antiquarian, matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, in 1760, and graduated BA in 1764, with the degree incorporated at Cambridge (where he was admitted to Sidney Sussex in 1767). He was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn on 13 January of this year, and called to the Bar in 1767. He died in India.
1. Call Wilkes … directions: Boswell is more guarded in the journal itself, where he makes no mention of his hopes to cultivate the acquaintance of the notorious Wilkes.
2. wits … belle esprit: Correctly, bel esprit: French, ‘lively, witty, cultivated person’. Boswell urges himself to become acquainted with Wilkes, Churchill, Thornton and Lloyd.
3. the Play: Farquhar’s comedy The Inconstant, or, The Way to Win Him (1702) played this night at Covent Garden.
1. Anecdotes Malloch: Boswell is evidently still contemplating writing or collecting anecdotes about David Mallet (perhaps with the ‘London Geniuses’ and his planned ‘paper essays’ in mind). The project seems not to have advanced.
1. have picture done: Boswell soon sits for his portrait to a miniaturist, who was probably Mauritius Lowe (1746–93), illegitimate son of Thomas, 2nd Baron Southwell (1698–1766). He was at this time a 17-year-old student in the studio of Giovanni Battista Cipriani (1727–85), an Italian neoclassical painter who had settled in London in 1755. Lowe exhibited miniatures at the Society of Artists in the later 1760s. In later life, Johnson took a charitable interest in Lowe, supported him and his family financially, and stood as godfather to two of his children.
2. Sunday: When he is planning to have guests.
3. By no means go down: Written along the right margin, and probably meaning, once again, ‘Do not go back to Edinburgh.’
4. Mr. Gascoigne: Not certainly identified. Possibly Charles Gascoigne, who had in March been appointed one of the Gentlemen of his Majesty’s Privy Chamber.
5. we were wond’rous merry: From a well-known catch by Purcell, the first line of which is ‘I gave her cakes and I gave her ale.’
6. Earl of Kelly: Oddly, Boswell has not before mentioned his presence in London.
1. your promise: The nature of this ‘promise’ is not recorded, but it is perhaps the bond into which Boswell entered for repayment of his £40 debt to Hart.
2. leaves the town: The 1762–3 theatre season was ending, and Garrick’s appearance this night as Lovemore in Murphy’s The Way to Keep Him (1760) was to be his last before the summer recess. His country residence was at Fuller House, Hampton-on-Thames. The Garricks were soon to leave for a tour to Europe.
3. Woodfall: Probably Henry Sampson Woodfall (1739–1805), publisher of the Public Advertiser, at the corner of Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row. Boswell will have a letter published in the Public Advertiser for 4 August (see n. 1 to 21 July), and he would later publish many essays (including an irregular series over the pseudonym ‘Rampager’) in the Public Advertiser.
4. an order: ‘A written direction to pay money or deliver property, made by a person legally entitled to do so’ (OED).
5. Sir Charles Asgill: Asgill (d. 1788), eminent banker, was a former alderman and a former lord mayor of London.
1. Guests: Boswell appears to be planning an event for this evening, but none is actually recorded in the journal.
2. Pay Douglas: Several consultations with Douglas are noted in the memoranda (but not the journal itself) since Boswell’s return from his miserable trip to Oxford.
3. Colonel Montgomerie: Archibald Montgomerie (1726–96), Eglinton’s brother and his successor in 1769 as earl, was at this time lieutenant colonel and commandant of the 62nd Foot, with the army rank of colonel. He had served with George Washington at Fort Duquesne (1758), and led an expedition against the Cherokees in 1760. He was MP for Ayrshire from 1761 to 1768.
4. the Spectator: ‘When I am in a serious Humour, I very often walk by myself in Westminster Abbey; where the Gloominess of the Place, and the Use to which it is applied, with the Solemnity of the Building, and the Condition of the people who lye in it, are apt to fill the Mind with a kind of Melancholy, or rather Thoughtfulness, that is not disagreeable’ (Addison, Spectator 26, 30 Mar. 1711).
5. Lord Coventry & his Brother: George William Coventry (1722– 1809), 6th Earl of Coventry, Lord Lieutenant of Worcester, and a lord of the bedchamber to George III (his wife was Mary Gunning (d. 1760), sister of the Duchess of Hamilton). His brother John Coventry (c.1724–1801), MP for Worcestershire 1751–61 (succeeding his brother in this seat when he became earl), took the additional surname Bulkeley in 1764 on succeeding to the estate of a cousin.
6. Mr. Price a welch member: ‘Mr. Price’ is either the famous Welsh wit Chase Price (c.1731–77), MP for Leominster 1759–67, then for Radnor 1768–77, whom Boswell mentions in his ‘Minced Pye’ (see Appendix IV), or Richard Price (1720–75), MP for Beaumaris.
1. Miss Temple: A lady of the town whose acquaintance Robert Temple has made (as explained in the journal entry for 31 May). Harris’s List for 1764 notes a ‘Miss T-mple’ in Spring Gardens, who may be this woman. The ‘Piazza’ is presumably the Great Piazza coffee house, Covent Garden.
2. half-blind Boy: Lowe had lost the sight of one eye in boyhood.
1. Order 13 to Dodsley: Presumably, thirteen copies of Letters E–B.
2. Duke of Norfolk’s: Edward Howard (1685/6–1777), 9th Duke of Norfolk. Norfolk was the premier dukedom of England.
3. Vauxhall: Popular pleasure gardens, called Spring Gardens when first opened in 1661. Developed in the eighteenth century by Jonathan Tyers (1702–67), who took a lease on the gardens in 1728, and bought the freehold in 1758. (The gardens remained in the Tyers family till 1821, and closed in 1859.) Vauxhall featured whimsical architecture, a wide variety of gardens and plants, an orchestra which played in a stand raised on columns, and arches, arcades, supper boxes and caged songbirds. It was illuminated brilliantly at night, and looked splendid when approached by water.
1. the Critical Review … might be: That Erskine and Boswell, said the Critical Review, are ‘men of wit and humour, in certain walks of both, cannot be denied; but we are afraid some question will be made whether either of them is a genius; though we own, that a happy extravagance, of which we have several instances in the letters before us, always enters into the composition of, though it cannot constitute, true genius.’ But the poems in the volume are ‘the cheapest and most nauseous drugs of this press-surfeited age and country’. Another letter-essay by ‘B.’ of ‘Westminster’ appeared this day in the Public Advertiser, a dream-sequence elaboration of the themes of the 23 May essay (timorousness, and the nightmarish terrors of nocturnal London).
1. cane: Boswell was purchasing a cane for his brother David, to send to him in Edinburgh. David wrote on 7 July that he had received the cane, ‘which is as pretty a one as I ever saw, every body takes notice of it, I return you Ten thousand thanks for it’ (Yale C 463).
1. illuminations: Festivities for the King’s birth-night (as explained in the journal entry.)
2. second-mourning suit: A dark suit for use after the period of strict or ‘first’ mourning for the departed had ended. Boswell’s had evidently grown shabby, and he had worn it while having his tonsorial attentions from Chetwynd.
3. Royal Volunteers: The 85th Foot (Robert Temple’s regiment), whose uniform featured a distinctive hat, worn cocked in the style of the time of Henry VIII, with narrow white lace and a plume of white feathers.
4. Brimstone: ‘A virago, a spit-fire’; like a ‘brim’, meaning in this sense a ‘bad, vicious woman’ (OED).
5. dipped my machine in the Canal: As mentioned in n. 8 for 25 November, a condom of this time needed to be moistened before use. A long canal and nearby Rosamond’s Pond (two ornamental stretches of water dug at the time of the Restoration, both later remodelled) occupied much of the centre of St James’s Park.
6. Ashley’s Punch-house … Bowls: Ashley’s, also known as the London Punch House and the London Coffee House, was on Ludgate Hill. In a 1731 notice the proprietor, James Ashley (d. 1776), advertised ‘the finest and best old Arrack, Rum and French Brandy … made into a Punch, with the other of the finest ingredients’.
7. volens nolens: Latin, ‘whether she would or not’.
1. as man of fashion forget: Pretend to forget the appointment, as a genteel well-born man would do. Boswell had written of this appointment in his journal of a week ago, ‘He may come. But I shall not’ (30 May).
2. if things stand: Unclear. Perhaps either with Miss Temple or with the miniaturist. But the journal entry does not clarify what or whom is meant.
3. send Temple: Presumably, send for Temple.
4. the second sight: Supposed ability to see or know distant or future events.
1. settled for tonight: Again unclear. Perhaps again a reference to an arrangement with Miss Temple.
1. Then Eglint[oune] & get some: Deleted by Boswell. He does not call on Eglinton this day. He is again listing men on whom he can call to collect more franks.
2. show letter: The letter he has just received from his father (mentioned in the journal entry), in response to a ‘warm’ letter he sent to Lord Auchinleck in mid-May.
3. harvest: The customary Scots term for autumn. Boswell hopes (as he now ponders the possibility of pleasing his father by becoming a lawyer in Edinburgh) that he can visit London every spring vacation, and have Temple visit him in Edinburgh each autumn vacation.
1. The ideas of John Smith … the seven dials here: The Seven Dials, a star-shaped junction of seven roads in what is now London’s West End, was at this time in an area of general poverty and disrepute. A pillory stood nearby, and (what Boswell doubtless has particularly in mind here) the area had been long associated with ballad-mongers and ballad-printers. Boswell’s general meaning is that he feels that social life in Edinburgh is equal only to that of an ordinary or inferior district in London. In his journal entry for 1 January he mentioned finding ‘the fife tongue’ (of the Erskines) and the ‘Nidderys Wynd’ style and manner ‘quite hideous’. The Miss Elliots of Minto, daughters of Sir Gilbert Elliot, are being referred to as typical of the society he would mingle with in Edinburgh, at such events as the Niddry’s Wynd musical concerts. The Elliot children were musical. Jane Elliot (1727–1805) composed the best-known version of the song ‘The Flowers of the Forest’ (lamenting the great loss of Scottish life at the Battle of Flodden). Which ‘John Smith’ (perhaps associated with the musical concerts in Edinburgh) Boswell might have in mind is not known.
2. Johnson: The equestrian performer whom Boswell first mentioned in his memorandum for 19 May. The Public Advertiser for 10 June announced that this would be Johnson’s ‘last day of performing’.
3. Shilinagarie: The name of an Irish tune popular in the eighteenth century (Irish ‘Síle ní Ghadra’ or ‘Síle ní Ghaidhere’, with various English attempts at rendering the title, such as ‘Sheela ne Gira’, ‘Sheela O’Gara’, and the one Boswell gives here).
4. Miss Simson … with her: She evidently lodged also at the Blue Periwig at the time of Boswell’s visits to Sally Forrester in 1760.
5. resumed: Recounted, recapitulated.
6. Captain Peter Grant a Scotch Officer: Not certainly identified, but possibly Lieutenant Peter Grant of the 42nd (Royal Highland) Regiment of Foot (two officers from which regiment Boswell had met at Covent Garden theatre on 8 December).
7. Mrs. Tredwell: An infant, Mary Thredwell, was christened at St Andrew’s, Holborn, on 14 May 1763 (about a month before this journal entry), with the father’s name given as William Thredwell, and the mother’s as ‘Arabella’, of Gray’s Inn Lane.
1. Sr. Dav[id]: This letter has not survived, but Dalrymple will write back on 16 June, ‘I had yours of the 11th June which I read with great pleasure … I approve of your plan of going abroad for some time[;] were you to come among us immediatly, you might come with all your imperfections on your head, exaggerated by ignorance and malice.’ (Dalrymple alludes playfully to the ghost of Hamlet’s father’s description of himself at the time of his murder, ‘No reck’ning made, but sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head’ – Hamlet I.v.78–9). He continued, ‘A little time will remove those prejudices, &, as you say, it will be fit to break off idle connexions by a change of place … I think I may promise you from a conversation I had with your father, that all disgusts will be forgotten, and that it is you alone who can make them remembered. He is a firm man, but he is not inflexible, and wishes, perhaps too eagerly, to see you add honour to an old and respected family.’ He closed by ‘rejoicing that your own good understanding has led you to see that great truth that every reasonable man must have an object in life’ (Yale C 1422).
2. Call Dun about Box: Unexplained.
3. see Pringle & fix: Enlist Pringle’s aid in promoting his new scheme (to travel in Europe for some time before settling to a law career in Scotland) to Lord Auchinleck.
4. be silent … keep counsel: Meaning, presumably, that he should not disclose to Eglinton (whose aid Boswell had earnestly sought and secured in pursuit of an army commission) his new plan to follow his father’s wish for a law career in Scotland, and decline Bute’s offer of an ensigncy (see next n. 1).
1. about Lord Bute: Boswell endorsed the note of 26 March, written by Bute to Eglinton, ‘The Prime Minister’s Note that I was to have an Ensigncy. But as I liked only the Guards I declined it’ (Corr. 1, p. 66).
2. Tuesday’s Music: What ‘Music’ Boswell has in mind is unexplained. He will sing catches with Eglinton on the next Wednesday.
3. Get letter … Advertiser: Boswell thinks of republishing his letter to Eglinton in the Scots Magazine (for which see the journal for 15 March and n. 4). The letter was not in fact republished. Boswell may have been thinking of restating in public his fondness for Eglinton, given that, having earnestly solicited and indeed secured Eglinton’s aid (including an approach to Bute) in his army scheme, he has now decided to give up this scheme and surrender to his father’s wishes.
4. St. Sepulchre’s Church upon Snow-hill: St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, largest parish church in the City, severely damaged in the Great Fire and renovated by Wren, 1670–71.
5. Monsieur de la Condamine: Charles-Marie de la Condamine (1701–74), French explorer, geographer and mathematician, among the several eminent French tourists now visiting London with the cessation of the war.
6. he knew Madam Maintenon: Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon (1635–1719), French educator and author, and second wife of Louis XIV. ‘Knew’ means ‘had known’.
7. a dangerous book: Helvétius’s De l’esprit (‘On mind’) argued that humankind was born a tabula rasa and formed knowledge from the senses and the association of ideas. Its (basically hedonist) argument was that actions and judgements are generated by the natural desire to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. Consequently, human behaviour is completely determined by education and social environment. The book, thought officially to be dangerously immoral, was condemned by the Sorbonne, and by the Pope, and was publicly burned. Boswell himself will write later in one of his essays as ‘The Hypochondriack’ (Essay VIII, ‘On Luxury’, May 1778; Hypochondriack, Vol. 1, p. 159), that Helvétius makes observations ‘with much justice’ about human education, but ‘amongst many false positions and licentious reveries’.
8. Deism: Belief in the existence of the supreme deity (who created the universe but does not intervene in it) without accepting revelation (through sacred writings or other sources).
1. Everdale: Everdale is unexplained. As Boswell is about to ‘Receive Dun & Everdale’, the name may perhaps be connected with the cane Boswell was buying for his brother David, which in his memorandum of the previous day he had told himself to ‘See Dun about’.
2. the Scholars of Pythagoras: The scholars of Pythagoras, in Croton in Calabria in the late sixth and early fifth centuries bc, were required to live austerely and ethically, own no personal possessions, and so on. Boswell met and was influenced by a self-taught Pythagorean philosopher, John Williamson, during his second trip to Moffat in 1757, and briefly adopted vegetarianism and other elements of the Pythagorean system.
3. Tuesday write Fathr: Lord Auchinleck will write back to Boswell on 18 June, ‘What you write in your last Letter of your being fully convinced of your passt errors and that you are determined for the future to follow the rational plan of Life so as to become an usefull and respected Member of Society and to lay aside Whims — has given me more satisfaction than I have had any time these four years …’ (Yale C 215).
4. Mcquhae: The letter sent to McQuhae on or about this date has not survived, but from McQuhae’s reply of 30 June it can be inferred that Boswell ‘informed’ him of ‘the good understanding which subsists betwixt Lord Auchinleck & you’. ‘I rejoice’, said McQuhae, ‘to hear of your intention to go abroad.’ McQuhae’s reply referred also to readers of Letters E–B in Scotland: ‘The Question about this Book is not whether it is well or ill wrote, but whether it was right or wrong in James Boswell Esqr. and Captain Erskine to publish their Letters. And in the usual manner the World is divided. Those who know Mr Boswell or Capt Erskine defend them — they who never saw their faces accuse them —’ (Corr. 9, pp. 422, 425–6).
5. Nanny’s husband: Not explained. But, perhaps not surprisingly, this reference marks the end of any mention of Boswell’s plan to make love to Nanny.
6. Temple-stairs: Or Temple Bridge, a landing place extending across two stone arches into the Thames at the foot of Middle Temple Lane.
1. the Literati: The literary men he has recently met.
1. review in Hyde park: On ‘Thursday morning the third battalion of the first regiment of foot guards, and the first battalion of the third, were reviewed in Hyde-Park. His Majesty and Prince William, with many other persons of distinction, were present’ (London Evening Post, 16 June 1763).
2. Brooksbanks: Boswell deleted ‘Brooksbanks’ and some other letters after it. The reference may be to Stamp Brooksbank (1726– 1802) or William Brooksbank (b. 1741), younger sons of Stamp Brooksbank MP (1694–1756), of Hackney House, Middlesex, and Healaugh, Yorkshire, who had been a governor and a director of the Bank of England. Stamp Brooksbank the younger, called to the Bar of the Middle Temple in 1749, had been secretary to the Customs Commissioners in Scotland from 1761, and would hold an appointment as a Commissioner of Excise until 1792. The name is mentioned again in the memorandum for 19 July, but not in the journal.
3. Dine soon … light things: Meaning uncertain. Perhaps, dine soon with Dempster. Boswell’s next recorded dinner is with James Erskine, on 18 June. He urges himself when dining to stick to topics such as the Cyder Bill, recently discussed in the House of Commons, and generally light topics.
4. Lett[er]s in Post: Among them was a letter to Johnston (enclosed in one to his brother David) in which Boswell urged Johnston to ‘go soon and see Charles [his illegitimate son with Peggy Doig], and let me know very particularly about him’, and continued: And now my friend I am to inform you that I have laid aside all thoughts of going into the army. I am disgusted with the neglect and hollowness of these great People from whom I expected great cordiality. Besides, I have lately had a most affectionate letter from my Father. He is truly a worthy Man. I assure you he is. All his little mistakes are owing to a confined and narrow Education, He has set before me, both schemes, and he seems so very anxious to have me in a civil capacity, as his eldest Son, and in a creditable way in my own country; and he promises to give me all encouragement and mentions my getting into Parliament, as a noble incitement.
When I think seriously and weigh all those considerations, I am fairly convinced that my pushing my Army Scheme, against so Many Obstacles, would be very hard, and as I would most certainly tire of it, in a few years, it would be very imprudent to run dissagreable hazards and to have the mortification of rendering my Father unhappy, for the transient indulgence of whim. I realy am of opinion that by putting on the gown [i.e. becoming a lawyer in Edinburgh] and being in that proper way, I have the best chance for sollid and lasting satisfaction and for being able to serve my friends. However I have begged first to go abroad which I hope will be allowed as I could not well come down [i.e. to Edinburgh] immediatly. I may, after travelling[,] come back a decent grave Man. (Corr. 1, pp. 78–9).
1. cultivate: Friendship with William Bosville.
2. see for Garrick: Boswell may have been contemplating a meeting bringing together Johnson and Garrick, his friend (and former pupil) from Lichfield.
1. Johnston: Samuel Johnson (Boswell inadvertently adds a ‘t’, giving the surname its more usual spelling in Scotland).
2. Ersk[ine]: That is, James Erskine.
3. Tothil Street: On a separate sheet, Boswell notes the address: ‘Tothil-Street Westm[inste]r. Two Brewers. Next door to Chandler Shop’. That is, the Two Brewers tavern, in Tothill Street.
4. don’t go down: To Edinburgh.
5. young Graham of Garthmore: William Graham (?1734–74) of Gartmore, Edinburgh advocate since 1756, eldest son of Nicol Graham (d. 1775) of Gartmore and Lady Margaret Cunninghame (1703/4–89), daughter of the 12th Earl of Glencairn. Boswell would meet him again while travelling in Lausanne, Switzerland, on 21 December 1764, and note in his journal for that date, ‘It pleased me to see that an Advocate may be made a fine fellow,’ though Graham ‘raged against the Scots Parliament House, and a man’s passing his whole life in writing “d-mned papers” ’ (Grand Tour I: McGraw-Hill, p. 270; Heinemann, p. 264).
6. privy Garden: Behind Whitehall, and later called Whitehall Gardens.
7. the Cyprian fury: Cyprus, off the coast of which, near Paphos, Aphrodite was said to have emerged from the sea-foam, was known in ancient times for the worship of Aphrodite and later of Venus.
1. Bloomsbury Church: St George’s Church, Hart Street, Bloomsbury, designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor (1661–1736), and consecrated in 1730. Its distinctive stepped tower is topped with the only known surviving statue of George I.
2. Wardour Street: The visit on Monday to Wardour Street, in Soho, is not explained.
3. Scott … Linlithgow: Robert Scott (d. c.1813), poet, later an apothecary and from 1769 an army physician (serving with the American-based 29th Foot, and in 1776–97 with the 3rd Dragoon Guards). ‘An Evening Walk, Written beside the ruins of the royal palace at Linlithgow’ was one of his fourteen poems included in Donaldson’s Collection I. Boswell’s ‘writes’ means ‘is the author of’.
4. breakfasted at the Somerset: Boswell presumably means ‘dined’ rather than ‘breakfasted’.
5. Mr. Cowper: Ralph Cooper (d. 1771), whose appointment in the Chapel Royal ran from 1758.
6. by himself: Next to himself.
1. King’s Arms: Which of the dozens of inns, taverns and other kinds of business premises with this name at this time cannot be known.
2. Reynolds &c: That is, see the portraits in the gallery attached to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s house, in Leicester Square, where he exhibited his works.
3. buy Hogarth: That is, buy a copy of Churchill’s new poem, An Epistle to William Hogarth. Wilkes and Churchill had become embroiled in an acrimonious public battle with Hogarth, whose political print entitled The Times, in September 1762, had pictorially defended Bute and George III and their Peace policies. Wilkes retaliated with an attack on Hogarth in the North Briton (no. 17) in the same month. Hogarth attended Wilkes’s appearance in court on 6 May, and produced a famously unflattering caricature-portrait of Wilkes, published on 16 May of this year, whereupon Churchill announced in public advertisements that he would address an epistle to Hogarth. It had been advertised in the press as forthcoming this day, 20 June. But Boswell will report to Dalrymple in a letter of 25 June that Churchill had told him it was not yet out. It will appear on 2 July (see the memoranda for 1 and 2 July, and notes).
4. Foote’s & think on Mrs. Brooke: The actress Mrs Brooke (d. 1782), estranged wife of a London engraver. F. A. Pottle concluded (Earlier Years, pp. 77–8, 478) that she and Boswell had had a sexual affair in Edinburgh, where she was acting, in 1761–2 (and that she is perhaps the woman referred to by the letter ‘A’ in his journals and notes for the period). Foote’s company had first come to Edinburgh in 1759, and Mrs Brooke may have been a member of it.
5. opening … season: Foote’s licence allowed him to put on evening theatrical performances only in the summer (June to September), after the two patent theatres had closed. (As he mentions in the journal entry for 10 May, Boswell had seen Foote’s The Orators in the afternoon of 9 May, between the hours of ‘one and three’.)
6. the Minor: Foote’s The Minor, a topical comedy that satirized Methodism, with Whitefield (who was cross-eyed) treated as ‘Dr Squintum’. Boswell had known of The Minor when it played first in 1760, as he published his Observations on it in that year. Boswell in later life regretted this youthful publication, at some point endorsing a copy of it in his library at Auchinleck, ‘This was an idle performance, and written inconsiderately, for I disapprove much of The Minor as having a profane and illiberal tendency’ (Frederick A. Pottle, The Literary Career of James Boswell, Esq. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929), p. 5).
7. Wilkinson … Mimic: Tate Wilkinson (1739–1803), actor, famous as a clever mimic, particularly of contemporary theatre people; later a provincial theatre actor and manager, chiefly in York, and later the author of entertaining and valuable theatre records: Memoirs of His Own Life (4 vols, 1790) and The Wandering Patentee; or, a History of the Yorkshire Theatres, from 1770 to the Present Time … (4 vols, 1795).
8. The mayor of Garrat: The Mayor of Garratt, a new comedy, also by Foote.
9. the Spikes: ‘Sitting at the spikes’ meant having a front-row seat in the pit (a row of spikes ran across the front of the stage).
1. Mee’s: Evidently a grocer.
2. all the news &c: Boswell is listing topics for discussion with Erskine, who will soon leave London, recapitulating the story of Letters E–B, and talking about the future.
3. Miss T: Presumably Miss Temple (despite what Boswell had said towards the end of his journal entry for 10 June).
1. Doctor Boswell: Boswell’s uncle John Boswell MD (1710–80), one of Lord Auchinleck’s younger twin brothers, a medical practitioner in Edinburgh and later president of the Royal College of Physicians there. (Boswell’s Court, in Edinburgh, is so named because he had a house there.) Boswell found him congenial, and was fond of him. He wrote to Johnston, ‘He is hospitable, and affectionate, and generous, and worth a thousand of your cold-blooded prudent cunning people who have done much better in the world’ (20 July 1763; Corr. 1, p. 93).
1. Miss Owen: ‘Miss Owen’ appears to be another lady of the town. Harris’s List for 1764 notes a ‘Miss O-ens’ in Bridges Street, who may be this woman. Boswell mentions plans again to meet her in his memoranda for 25, 27 and 28 June and 3 July, but it is not clear whether or not he does so.
2. plan: That is, the plan to accede to his father’s wishes, to travel in Europe, to study law and become an Edinburgh advocate, to aspire to a seat in Parliament, and in general to seek to acquire a worthy, stable, studious and dignified character.
1. Review: ‘This day Lord Ligonier will review the three regiments of foot guards in Hyde Park, when they are to fire with 14 pieces of cannon, by battalions chequered in different forms, and to practise all the exercise by signals and beat of drum, which are to be performed at the King’s review on Monday next’ (Gazetteer and London Daily Advertiser, 24 June 1763). According to the London Evening Post for the next day, the King, along with two of his brothers, Prince William and Prince Henry, and several noblemen (including Granby), attended this particularly spectacular review, with ‘at the least computation, near 100,000 other people’. The London Chronicle of the same date put the estimate at 40,000.
2. Low Painter: Boswell appears to pun on the painter’s name.
3. like Father: Lord Auchinleck as a young man had studied law in Leiden.
4. Lord Litchfield … Oxford: Lichfield had been among the ‘elegant Company’ at Eglinton’s breakfast concert on 7 December, which Boswell attended.
5. Doctor Jardine: John Jardine DD (1715–66), one of the ministers of the Tron Church in Edinburgh, where he was a sociable and popular figure (acquainted with Hume and other literary and intellectual eminences, a friend of John Home, and among the Moderates of the Church of Scotland). His wife, Jean Drummond (d. 1766), was a daughter of the Lord Provost of Edinburgh, George Drummond. Jardine held several appointments which brought him to London: he was one of the King’s chaplains-in-ordinary (1759), dean of the Chapel Royal (1761), and, from this year, dean of the Order of the Thistle. In 1782, one of his daughters, Janet Jardine (1762–1840), married George Home.
1. write Sr. Dav[id]: On 1 July, Dalrymple will write back thanking Boswell for his last ‘two letters’, including presumably the one written this day. ‘Now as to your second letter; when you say that without affectation or superstition you pray God to keep you in good resolutions, & while at the same time you distrust yourself, I answer, that with those dispositions & while under that apprehension you are safe.’ He goes on to reassure Boswell about the many social pleasures of Utrecht, and gives Boswell lengthy advice about how to learn French and how to use his time in Europe to good purpose (Yale C 1423).
2. no papers … Johnst[on]: Boswell advises himself not to take his private papers to Holland with him. With this London journal (and earlier journals and letters) in Johnston’s care, he will leave ‘some parcels in one of the drawers’ of Temple’s rooms in the Inner Temple, which he will ask Temple to ‘keep for me till I return’ (3 Aug. 1763; Corr. 6, p. 60). Temple complied. When the pair met again in London after Boswell’s European travels, two and a half years later, Boswell retrieved these ‘books and papers’, and had a ‘most curious pleasure in revising old ideas’ (17 Feb. 1766; Grand Tour II: McGraw-Hill, p. 288; Heinemann, p. 304).
3. note of Ship & horn nailed on: A thin pane of translucent animal horn was used to protect paper from being soiled or damaged. The ‘note of Ship’ may be a reference to a shipment of some kind (perhaps the cane for David).
4. the Posterity of Ham who was cursed: As recounted in Genesis 9.20–27, Ham saw his father, Noah, lying drunk and naked in his tent. Noah cursed Ham’s son, Canaan, declaring him a slave to his brothers. Some of Ham’s descendants, in particular, Cush, are black, so that the ‘curse of Ham’ was interpreted by some (especially those seeking a biblical justification for racial slavery) as black skin colour and features.
5. Teague: Nickname (now largely obsolete) for an Irishman.
6. Mitre Tavern in Fleet-street: Near St Dunstan’s Church, close to Temple Bar. Its proprietor at this time was Roger Cole (d. 1767).
7. Cibber … what he realy had: Opinions of Cibber’s merits as playwright, actor and poet were, and remain, divided. Those hostile to him represented him as a buffoonish mediocrity. Pope made him the ‘hero’ dunce of the expanded 1742 version of his mock-epic The Dunciad, which did much to shape his later general reputation.
8. his Birth-day Odes … bad: Cibber was Poet Laureate from 1730 until his death in 1757. These odes were required from the Laureate, to commemorate the King’s birthday.
9. I made some corrections …. many months by him: Boswell’s later diaries three times refer to Johnson and this anecdote, the fullest (and most explanatory) reference coming nearly fourteen years later: ‘He spoke of Colley Cibber, and mentioned his consulting him upon one of his Birthday Odes, a good while before it was wanted, in which Ode was this couplet
Perch’d on the soaring eagle’s wing
The lowly linnet loves to sing.
Colley had heard of the Wren perching on the Eagle’s wing, & had mistaken it for the linnet. To this and other passages the Doctor [i.e. Johnson] objected, and Colley lost patience and did not read his Ode through. The Doctor thinks this happened in 1753. Colley made alterations afterwards’ (21 Sept. 1777, at Ashbourne; Extremes, p. 175). Cibber’s birthday ode for 1753 nonetheless retained the linnet, and begins, ‘As on the soaring eagle’s wing / Aloft the linnet joys to sing’.
10. Whitehead: William Whitehead (1715–85), poet and playwright, Cibber’s successor as Poet Laureate.
11. inscribed to Players: Whitehead had written a poem complimenting Garrick on his appointment as patentee of Drury Lane Theatre in 1747. Garrick acted leading parts in Whitehead’s plays and appointed him reader of new plays for Drury Lane, and the pair were associated for some twenty years. Johnson generally held actors in low regard.
12. Ruin … banners wait: The opening two lines of Gray’s ‘The Bard. A Pindaric Ode’, slightly misquoted: ‘ “Ruin seize thee, ruthless King! / Confusion on thy banners wait …” ’ Boswell added later in his margin, ‘The next lines I think very/pretty good[:] Tho’ fanned’, which he expanded (quoting Johnson) in the Life (p. 214) to: ‘The two next lines in that Ode are, I think, very good:
“Though fanned by conquest’s crimson wing,
They mock the air with idle state.” ’
13. Song of Johny Armstrong: A popular ballad commemorating the exploits of John Armstrong (d. ?1530) in the contested Anglo-Scottish border areas. It is one of the works Boswell included in his chapbook collection (see entry for 10 July), but in an English ballad version which places Armstrong and his exploits in Westmoreland. Johnson would mention this ballad again in similar terms while discussing Gray’s poetry in his ‘Life’ of Gray, in his Prefaces Biographical and Critical (‘Lives of the Poets’, 1779–81).
14. Change: ‘A place where merchants meet for the transaction of business, an exchange. (Since 1800, erroneously treated as an abbreviation of Exchange, and written ’Change)’ (OED).
15. The Duke of Bedford: The wealthy John Russell (1710–71), 4th Duke of Bedford. His house was in Bloomsbury Square. The dukes of Bedford indeed owned most of Bloomsbury.
1. Cannonbury House … Goldsmith stays: A manor formerly of the priory and convent of St Bartholomew, Canonbury House had various noble and aristocratic occupants and owners after the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, and its narrow brick tower (17 ft square and 60 ft high) was let out as apartments. Goldsmith lodged here from late 1762 to 1764, the accommodation being arranged for the rather feckless author by his publisher, John Newbery (1713–67).
1. Review … King: The King’s review of a ‘grand muster’ of the three regiments of Foot Guards (for which the 24 June review in Hyde Park was a practice) on the Parade. ‘Upon his Majesty’s returning from the review on horseback, attended by his Nobles and General Officers, the great crowd of spectators seemed determined to compliment their Sovereign with huzzas and shouts of joy’ (London Evening Post, 28 June 1763).
2. Ogilvie: The Rev. John Ogilvie (1732/3–1813), from 1766 DD, Aberdeen-born Church of Scotland clergyman, minister of Midmar from 1760, poet, and author of hymns, treatises and sermons. Boswell (unlike Johnson) regarded his poetry highly. Boswell and he had been acquainted earlier. Ogilvie wrote to him on 23 June to let him know that he had now taken lodgings in an inn after arriving in London.
3. cure of narrowness: Boswell long held his boyhood tutors in Edinburgh responsible for his feelings of having been ‘narrowly’ educated – that is, not exposed to social and cultural range and depth. Boswell uses the term also to mean parsimony. In the final sentences of the entry for 6 July, he will note, ‘I have got rid of the narrowness & love of money which my love of frugality made me contract.’
4. let Temple go to Cambridge: Temple was due to return to Cambridge to resume his studies, having been readmitted to Trinity Hall on 22 June, but Boswell is hoping to keep him in London longer for his friendship and advice.
1. going too soon: Leaving London for Utrecht too soon. Boswell wrote to Johnston on 30 June that ‘My Father wants to have me go as soon as possible. So that I shall set out in a Forthnight or less’ (Corr. 1, p. 82).
2. Will’s … the Spectator: The Will’s Coffee House mentioned often in The Spectator stood at No. 1 Bow Street, on the west side of Russell Street, Covent Garden.
1. Write … Presid[ent] & Advocate: Write letters to Lord Auchinleck, to the Lord President of the Court of Session, Robert Dundas (1713–87) of Arniston, and to Thomas Miller, the Lord Advocate.
2. See Heron & Sr. W — you was at their houses: Patrick Heron (c.1735–1803), son-in-law of Lord and Lady Kames, husband of Jean (Home) Heron. Boswell visited Heron’s house, at Kirroughtree, in Galloway, in September and October 1762, during his Harvest Jaunt. Sir William Maxwell (1739–1804), Boswell’s first cousin once removed, was 3rd Baronet of Springkell, in Dumfriesshire, where Boswell had also stayed in October 1762.
3. Poor Johnst[on] is dull: Johnston lamented to Boswell in a letter of 20 June that he had been feeling ‘altogether depressed’ at the time he received Boswell’s last letter (dated 17 May) ‘and often Since’. He had just returned to Edinburgh from the country and, he wrote, was ‘not as yet fixed in a proper lodging, which makes me unhappy’ (Corr. 1, p. 79). On 30 June Boswell wrote to him, ‘I sympathise very heartily with your distress. It is indeed a most severe Affliction … My Dear Friend! do all you can to keep free of it. Mix business and amusement, so that your mind may be allways employed and no time left for the gloomy broodings of a distempered fancy’ (ibid., p. 81).
4. get B[ob] Temp[le’]s guineas: Either Bob Temple owes Boswell some guineas, or Boswell is intending to lend him some guineas. Temple will write to Boswell from Cambridge on 24 July, ‘Pray has [Bob] received his money [i.e. money which Bob thought due to him from his regiment] yet? If he has not I fear he has been obliged to borrow still more of you’ (Corr. 6, p. 49). See also n. 4 to 25 July.
1. Johnst[on]: Boswell’s letter to Johnston this day continued, ‘I hope you approve of my plan of going abroad. I never could be able to make anything of my Army schemes. My Father’s rooted Aversion would have allways prevented me from rising in that way. By falling in with his schemes I am making him easy and happy … And now my friend Dont you think that I am upon a better plan than forcing myself into the Guards in time of peace where I should be continualy fighting – not against the french – but against my Father’s Inclination?’ (Corr. 1, pp. 81–2).
2. J. Bruce about Race: In a letter of 8 July, Bruce acknowledges a letter from Boswell of ‘About three weeks ago’, but says nothing about a ‘race’ (Corr. 8, p. 4). Perhaps the horse races held at Ayr are meant.
1. your last: The last issue of the Review he will see before departure for Holland. He probably refers to the Monthly Review, which in its June issue gave Letters E–B a very favourable notice: ‘This honourable and ingenious duumvirate appear to be officers in the Army; young men fresh from North Britain, full of blood, full of spirits, and full of fun. Vive la bagatelle is their maxim.’
2. hear Lord Chancellor: This reference to the Lord Chancellor is unexplained. It does not appear (from the journal entry) that Boswell did in the event hear Henley speak.
3. at 2 Johnston: See Johnson at two o’clock.
4. Sat[urday] — Hogarth: Newspaper advertisements of this day and the day before announced that Churchill’s Epistle to William Hogarth would be published on Saturday 2 July.
5. Campbell who wrote the lives of the Admirals: John Campbell (1708–75), Edinburgh-born historian and prolific miscellaneous author, who had received an honorary LLD from the University of Glasgow in 1745. Bute commissioned him this year to write a vindication of the Treaty of Paris. His popular The Lives of the British Admirals and other Eminent British Seamen appeared in four volumes 1742–4, had three editions, and would be continued and expanded after his death.
6. his Wife … Printer’s Devil: Elizabeth Vobe, of Leominster. A printer’s ‘devil’ is a young assistant who runs errands and does miscellaneous jobs in a printing office.
7. Ennemy of his: Churchill had mentioned Johnson not unfavourably in The Rosciad (March 1761), but attacked him satirically as ‘Pomposo’ in the second book of The Ghost (the first two books of which appeared in March 1762).
8. Hermippus Redivivus: Campbell’s Hermippus Redivivus, or, The Sage’s Triumph over Old Age and the Grave, based on a work by a German physician, Johann Heinrich Cohausen (1665–1750), appeared in 1743. Boswell reports reading it in his Harvest Jaunt journal (26 Sept. 1762). A facetious work, it contended that a man’s life may be prolonged in health by the breath of young girls.
9. the Rosicrusian Philosophy: In the Life, Boswell changed ‘Rosicrusian’ to ‘Hermetick’. Though Campbell’s work briefly mentions the Rosicrucians (members of an ancient esoteric society or order claiming various forms of secret mystical knowledge, such as the transmutation of metals, the prolongation of life, and power over the elements), it treats more lengthily the Hermetic philosophers (followers of a set of mystical or esoteric doctrines deriving from writings attributed to the Hellenistic Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus).
10. Thornton’s burlesque ode: Thornton’s parody Ode on Saint Cæcelia’s Day, Adapted to the Ancient British Musick, written while he was at Christ Church, Oxford, in 1749, was revived this year, and, given a new musical setting, was performed at Ranelagh on 10 June.
11. wanted matter: Lacked solidity, seriousness.
1. Go for tea … Doug[las]: Boswell has been reminding himself to ‘borrow’, ‘buy’ or ‘get’ tea in his memoranda since 14 June. It appears that he now must dash out this morning and buy it just in time for the breakfast he has planned for introducing his uncle and Andrew Douglas.
2. Coote’s & Troughton’s in Fenchurch Street &c: John Coote (d. 1808), bookseller, at this time in Paternoster Row, at the King’s Arms. He was the publisher of Churchill’s Epistle to William Hogarth, which is doubtless the reason for Boswell’s errand here. Boswell sent the poem with his letter to Dalrymple of this day. Bryan and Nathaniel Troughton were jewellers in Fenchurch Street.
3. Johnst[on]: To Johnston Boswell wrote this day, ‘It gives me much Satisfaction to find by your letter of last Post [i.e. Johnston’s dated 27 June], that you are pleased with my embracing the sober prudent plan which my Father has allway[s] been so anxiously bent on my pursuing … By following my Father’s plan, I have the best chance for rational permanent felicity … My going abroad is a matter of great importance. To return to Scotland immediatly, would have appeared odd, and with all my early assurance, I should have found it hard to have stood the ridicule which would have fall’n upon such inconsistent desultory conduct. I hope to return from abroad, a settled decent Man … I shall study steadiness: and I don’t despair of attaining it. Habit is all in all. When I am abroad, I will not have such temptations to foolish extravagant conduct[,] as I will be among Strangers, and so take whatever character I chuse, and persist in it’ (Corr. 1, pp. 82–3)
4. give or leave him Gray: Boswell will give Temple a book of ‘Gray’s poems’, which in the event he will ask Flexney to leave for him, as a gift before departing for Europe (Corr. 6, p. 60).
5. Doctor Robertson: William Robertson (1721–93), historian, Church of Scotland clergyman (of the Moderate party) and from 1762 principal of the University of Edinburgh. He was at this time at work on his The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V (1769) and that month he had secured from Bute appointment as Historiographer to the King for Scotland.
6. Mr. Fordyce: John Fordyce (1738–1809), of Ayton, was an Edinburgh banker, at this time a partner in Fordyce, Grant and Company, and later receiver-general of the land tax in Scotland.
1. Write Miss Montgomerie & Miss Dallas: Margaret Montgomerie (?1738–89) of Lainshaw, Boswell’s cousin, whom he would marry in 1769, and Isabella Dallas (?1741–92), his distant cousin, a young woman whom he had first met, and was attracted by, in Inverness in 1761 when travelling on the northern judicial circuit with his father. She later married the Rev. James Riddoch (d. 1778), minister of St Paul’s Episcopal Church in Aberdeen. She and Boswell would meet again in Aberdeen during his Scottish tour with Johnson in 1773.
2. appoint Goldsmith: To join Boswell’s planned supper with Johnson, Ogilvie and others on the coming Wednesday.
3. Cochrane … account of it: William Cochrane, the Judge Advocate. Boswell wrote to Dalrymple (9 July 1763), ‘A gentleman newly come from studying civil law there [i.e. Utrecht] represented it to me as the dullest formal dissagreable place he had ever been in. That I would neither have agreable company male, nor female; that I would have no manner of chearfull gayety, and that my spirits would sink, & my mind become compleatly dismal and Melancholy’ (National Library of Scotland, MS 25295, ff. 11–12v). Dalrymple replied with reassuring accounts of Utrecht.
1. Mrs. Salmon’s famous wax-work: This famous waxwork (the word is now commonly used in the plural) had been in business since the late seventeenth century, and moved from its original premises to the north side of Fleet Street, near Chancery Lane, in 1711. Mary Salmon (?1650–1740) carried on the business after the death of her husband in 1718, remarried, and became Mrs Steers, but retained the well-known original name for business purposes. After her death the waxwork, still known as Mrs Salmon’s, was purchased by a London surgeon, Dr John Clarke, and continued into the nineteenth century, carried on by Clarke’s widow, Biddy (Mansfield) Clarke (d. 1812). To its diverse collection of regular exhibits, which were said to have included 150 figures in its ‘Royal Court of England’, some topical new ones had been added just before the time of Boswell’s visit. They included a representation of the recent christening of George, Prince of Wales (later King George IV), who had been born on 12 August 1762, and models of the three Cherokee men who had visited London in 1762.
1. franks & horse to Bob: Boswell is giving franks (perhaps just collected from Dempster) to Robert Temple. The ‘horse’ is unexplained, but later memoranda show Boswell eager to rid himself of Bob and have him go to Cambridge and join his brother.
2. Cochrane for money: Boswell needs to be paid his allowance in advance by Cochrane in order to be able to pay for dinner for Johnson and his other guests at the Mitre on 6 July, to pay what he owes Terrie, and to begin to make purchases to prepare for his trip to Utrecht.
3. guineas to Johnst[on]: Andrew Erskine, about to return to Scotland, was to take with him the money that Boswell owed Johnston for the shoes and stocks he had ordered from Orlando Hart (see n. 1 to 17 February). But, in the event, Boswell will have his uncle, Dr Boswell, deliver the money (see n. 1 to 20 July).
4. white-rob’d Innocence, and flower-bespangled Meads: These precise phrases do not occur in Ogilvie’s poems published before this date, but several similar images and locutions appear: ‘But spotless Beauty rob’d in white / Sits on yon moss-grown hill reclin’d’ (‘Ode to Innocence’); ‘The vale where musing Quiet treads, / The flow’r clad lawns, and bloomy meads’ (Ode, ‘To Time’); ‘See flow’ry meads that breathe eternal bloom’ (‘The Day of Judgement’); and ‘the flower-enamell’d dale’ and ‘white-robed Silence’ (‘Ode to Evening’). Pope had used ‘white-rob’d Innocence’ in his ‘Messiah’ (Works, 1736): ‘Peace o’er the world her olive wand extend, / And white rob’d Innocence from Heaven descend.’ The expression had appeared several times thereafter, among other places in Richard Shepherd’s ‘The Nuptials’.
5. more merit than … will allow: Boswell wrote to Dalrymple on 2 July that ‘Your old acquaintance, Ogilvie, is in town. He is going to publish an allegorical poem, entitled Providence. I have just looked into it. The plan is new and ingenious; and you know his imagination is rich, and his numbers melodious. He is also a very good sort of man’ (National Library of Scotland, MS 25295, ff. 9–10v). Ogilvie’s Providence, a lengthy blank-verse religious poem in three books, appeared in early 1764.
6. the Roundhouse: A ‘round-house’ (or ‘watch-house’) was the lockup in which prisoners were held before being brought before a magistrate, and the place where the watchmen congregated for their policing duties in various parishes. Of the several in London at this time, one stood in St Martin’s Lane, opposite the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, another in the grounds of St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, one (octagonal-shaped) near the Church of St Mary le Strand, and another – the ancient St Giles watchhouse – in the centre of Holborn.
7. soused: To ‘souse’ is to ‘strike, smite, or beat severely or heavily’ (OED).
1. send Hume … Vol: That is, return the first five volumes of Hume’s History of England to Dempster, from whom he had borrowed them, but not the more recently borrowed sixth, which evidently he is still reading. Boswell is tidying up as he prepares to leave his Downing Street lodgings.
2. take all things to Chambers: Take his belongings from the Terries’ to Temple’s rooms.
3. Stewart: Which ‘Stewart’ is not known.
4. Punch … sowring: Eighteenth-century punch recipes called typically for citrus-fruit juices – usually lemon or lime, with oranges used later in the century – as one of the standard ingredients. The notion of the sour with the sweet as a necessary component of punch, as indeed of life, had made earlier literary appearances. Boswell may have in mind ‘On Punch: An Epigram’ (which concludes with the well-known couplet, ‘What harm in drinking can there be / Since Punch and life so well agree?’), by his countryman Thomas Blacklock (1721–91), published in his Poems on Several Occasions (which first appeared in 1746, with the epigram appearing in the edition of 1756):
Life is a bumper fill’d by fate
And we the guests who share the treat;
Where strong, insipid, sharp and sweet,
Each other duly temp’ring meet (ll. 5–8)
In the Life (p. 179), Boswell pointed out (quoting the final four lines of Blacklock’s poem) the similarity between this thought and the conceit of Idler 34 (9 December 1754), in which Johnson playfully elaborated on the ways in which ‘the qualities requisite to conversation are very exactly represented by a bowl of punch’, a ‘liquor compounded of spirit and acid juices, sugar and water’. Within this mixture, ‘the acidity of the lemon will very aptly figure pungency of raillery, and acrimony of censure’.
5. His Clerk: William Marsden (d. 1769). At his death, he was described as ‘principal clerk to Sir John Fielding; in which station he had served that Magistrate several years, and with such ability, integrity, and resolution, as makes his death a public loss’ (Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 13 Jan. 1769).
6. quarter two Lifeguard men upon him: Billet soldiers of the Life Guards in his rooms.
7. Natural Philosophy: What would now be termed science, in particular, chemistry.
8. Assa fœtida: Asafoetida, a resinous pungent-smelling plant gum, used in some medicines and as a food flavouring. Burning it would produce a particularly acrid aroma.
9. Rasselas: Johnson’s The Prince of Abissinia. A Tale (later and more popularly known by the name of its hero, Rasselas) appeared in 1759. Its theme of the ‘choice of life’ resonated with the young Boswell, and he wrote in the Life of Johnson, ‘The fund of thinking which this work contains is such, that almost every sentence of it may furnish a subject of long meditation. I am not satisfied if a year passes without my having read it through; and at every perusal, my admiration of the mind which produced it is so highly raised, that I can scarcely believe that I had the honour of enjoying the intimacy of such a man’ (Life, p. 183).
10. The life of Savage: Johnson’s An Account of the Life of Mr. Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers, a biography of his early acquaintance the poet Richard Savage (?1697–1743), who claimed to be the illegitimate son of the Countess of Macclesfield, appeared in 1744. As a sympathetic account of a troubled and in many ways dissolute man, it marked an important early departure from traditions of biography as panegyric.
11. The Translations … of Juvenal: Johnson’s London: a Poem (1733) was ‘In Imitation of the Third Satire of Juvenal’. The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) was ‘The Tenth Satire of Juvenal Imitated’.
12. The Prologue … Theatre: ‘Prologue: Spoken at the Opening of the Theatre in Drury Lane’ (1747). Garrick commissioned this poem from Johnson to mark the reopening of the Drury Lane theatre under his management.
13. Mr. Eccles an irish Gentleman of fortune: Isaac Ambrose Eccles (1737–1809), of Cronroe, Co. Wicklow, author, who later published studies of Shakespeare, transposing scenes he thought wrongly placed in the plays.
14. the British Constitution: Unwritten, as a single codified constitutional document, but existing in effect organically in various statutes, cases and treatises.
15. Bayle’s Dictionary: Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), French philosopher and theological controversialist, whose Dictionnaire historique et critique (1696, 2nd edn 1702) was a pioneer work of compilation, and an important influence on later biographical and encyclopedic writing.
16. the Biographical part of Literature … loved most: Johnson wrote in Rambler 60 (13 Oct. 1750) that ‘no species of writing seems more worthy of cultivation than biography, since none can be more delightful or more useful, none can more enchain the heart by irresistible interest, or more widely diffuse instruction to every diversity of condition’, and in Idler 84 (24 Nov. 1759) that ‘Biography is, of the various kinds of narrative writing, that which is most eagerly read, and most easily applied to the purposes of life.’ Boswell echoed the sentiment in one of his own essays as ‘The Hypochondriack’. In a state of hypochondria (that is, depression), ‘Every man should read then what he likes best at the time. I have generally found the reading of lives do me most good, by withdrawing my attention from myself to others, and entertaining me in the most satisfactory manner with real incidents in the varied course of human existence’ (Essay VI, ‘On Hypochondria’, Mar. 1778; Hypochondriack, vol. 1, p. 149).
17. not rich country: Goldsmith had lived in Edinburgh in the 1750s. In a letter (of 26 September 1753) to his cousin Robert Bryanton he wrote, ‘Shall I tire you with a description of this unfruitfull country? where I must lead you over their hills all brown with heath, or their valleys scarce able to feed a rabbet? Man alone seems to be the only creature who has arived to the naturall size in this poor soil; every part of the country presents the same dismall landscape, no grove nor brook lend their musick to cheer the stranger, or make the inhabitants forget their poverty; yet with all these disadvantages to call him down to humility, a scotchman is one of the proudest things alive’ (Katherine C. Balderston, ed., The Collected Letters of Oliver Goldsmith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1928, pp. 9–10).
18. this … strong humour: Ogilvie disputed some of the elements of Boswell’s account of this scene as published in the Life of Johnson, offering a different version in a letter published in London and Edinburgh magazines (English Review, Nov. 1791; Edinburgh Magazine, Nov. 1791.) Boswell’s representation of his role in the conversation at the Mitre was, Ogilvie claimed, ‘a very imperfect narrative (to say the least of it)’. As he was shy, ‘inexperienced, and one of the youngest persons’ in the company, he introduced no subjects of conversation, and most certainly not ‘praise of my native country’, since ‘Johnson’s dislike of Scotland is well known, and formed a predominant part of his character’. Johnson ‘entered into the subject himself, and launched into an account of that kingdom by no means gratifying to a native of it, with that energy of voice and gesture by which, as well as by command of language, he was at all times eminently distinguished’. Ogilvie ‘eyed this literary dictator with some attention’, made ‘no remark of any kind whatever’, but ‘I now began to feel in behalf of my country; and I ventured, with some timidity, to ask Dr. Johnson whether he had ever been in Scotland? Upon his answering in the negative … I took occasion to say (as Mr. Boswell chose to remain silent), that although Scotland was in general less cultivated than England, the face of the country more mountainous, the soil perhaps less fertile, and the seasons surely more unfavourable; yet that some particular parts of North-Britain were certainly equal in beauty and fertility to any in England. And I mentioned particularly, if I rightly remember, the counties of Lothian and Fife. I do not recollect that I said anything concerning its wild and noble prospects. Yet it is very possible that I may have mentioned the rude magnificence of its highland regions. To all this Dr. Johnson replied simply in these words: “Sir, I believe the best thing in Scotland is the road to England.” My memory preserves no stronger trace of the roar of applause wherewith so many well-bred men concurred in honouring this enunciation, than my ear retains of this moment its sound. My answer, I distinctly recollect, was, that opinion was the judge of that matter; and that, in mine, the best thing in England was the road to Scotland, for which, I added, that I very soon proposed to set out’ (English Review, Nov. 1791, pp. 397–400). Boswell, who in his journal-letter to Erskine described Ogilvie at this conversation as ‘piteous’ (see Appendix IV), wrote to Erskine on 6 March 1793 that Ogilvie had written to the English Review ‘questioning petulantly enough the authenticity of Johnson[’s] humourous retort to him on the noble wild prospects’ (Yale L 531).
19. awfull: Full of awe; awe-inspiring.
20. ancient Chapel of St. Anthony: The ruins of this chapel, possibly of the sixteenth century but of unknown date, overlooked one of the small lochs on the northern side of Holyrood Park.
21. splendid court-end taverns: Higher-priced establishments in the court (west) end of London.
1. Bishops’-gate Street, where the Cambridge Machine inns: Most coaches for Cambridge at this time left from the (Black) Bull inn, and the Green Dragon inn, Bishopsgate Street Within.
2. perambulate Spain: Playfully echoing Johnson’s wording in his advice to Boswell (journal entry for 25 June). Boswell does not record the precise date of Erskine’s departure for Edinburgh. Their last meeting was on 2 July. Boswell will be deeply wounded that Erskine does not write to him before he leaves for Utrecht. Erskine next wrote to Boswell on 16 February 1764 (when Boswell was in Holland), noting that ‘You took so ill my not writing to you before you left London that when you went abroad you did not so much as tell me where you was going’, and that he had learned of Boswell’s whereabouts only after a meeting with Johnston in Edinburgh. He explained that, after he himself left London, ‘I came to Edinburgh, where I was in the deepest low spirits’ (Boswell in Holland: McGraw-Hill, p. 175–6; Heinemann, p. 171). In later life, Erskine and Boswell drifted apart, saw each other in Scotland only intermittently, and corresponded little. Erskine resided mainly at Kellie Castle with his brother, the 6th Earl, or with his sister, Lady Betty, at New Tarbet, Dumbartonshire, and then, after Macfarlane’s death, with her and her second husband, Lord Colville, at Drumsheugh House in Edinburgh. He lived in straitened financial circumstances, in general melancholy and ill health, and wrote and published little more. In October 1793 he drowned himself.
1. the Captain: Bob Temple.
2. ye Lady’s letter: Unexplained.
3. dress like Temp: Either dress like Temple or dress in a style appropriate to an inhabitant of the Temple.
4. George’s: Presumably the coffee house of that name.
5. Caxton his Printer: Either a slip, since Flexney’s printer was Chandler, or Boswell is playfully invoking the name of William Caxton (c.1422–91), the first great English printer.
6. M. de Léry a Canadian: Gaspard-Joseph (or Joseph-Gaspard) Chaussegros de Léry (1721–97), Canadian military officer, engineer and surveyor. He had fought against the British in the French and Indian Wars. He and his family had been sent to France in late 1761, and he had recently been negotiating his return to Canada with the British authorities. He ‘had the distinction of being’ while in London at this time the first Canadian seigneur presented to George III. In 1778 he was appointed to the Legislative Council of Québec, and in 1792 to the Legislative Council of Lower Canada (Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. IV: 1771– 1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1979), pp. 145–7).
7. the Queen’s head in Holbourn: Either the Queen’s Head tavern, at Gray’s Inn Gate, or the Queen’s Head inn, Gray’s Inn Lane.
8. Rhenish: Wine from the region of the Rhine.
9. the Rolls in Chancery-lane: The Rolls House, where the records of the Court of Chancery were kept.
1. Write to Sr. D[avid] & Johnston: Boswell wrote to both Dalrymple and Johnston this day, expressing his fears that Utrecht might be a dull place, and that (as he put it to Johnston) he might ‘grow very melancholy there’ (Corr. 1, pp. 85–6)
1. Bow church: St Mary-le-Bow, off Cheapside, rebuilt by Wren 1670–83 after the Great Fire. With its famously high steeple, it was the most expensive of Wren’s new churches (after St Paul’s Cathedral). A new peal of bells had been installed in 1762, and rang for the first time on 4 June (the King’s birthday) that year.
2. King’s Bench: If the reference is to the Court of King’s Bench, then in Westminster Hall. But Boswell probably refers to the King’s Bench walk, in the Inner Temple.
3. Clack: Nickname for John Claxton.
4. Mark in Boswell … roasting &c: Boswell reminds himself to include in his ‘Boswelliana’ the anecdotes listed here: a remark about David Hume by John Hall Stevenson (see Appendix IV and n. 4); Johnson’s reply to Ogilvie about ‘noble prospects’ in Scotland; and (presumably) his own retort to Eglinton, who was ‘roasting’ him on his publications (entry for 9 July).
5. centrical temple for the bluff Citizens: A tradition still holds that to be a true ‘cockney’ you have to be born within the sound of the Bow bells (see n. 1 above).
6. Dicey: The printing and publishing firm founded by William Dicey (d. 1756) had flourished in Bow Churchyard, off Cheapside (as well as in Northampton, publishing the Northampton Mercury), at least since the 1730s. It specialized in publishing inexpensive ballads, pictorial prints (maps, views, portraits) and chapbooks – short tales often sold by itinerant vendors (‘chapmen’, hence the word ‘chapbooks’). Cluer Dicey (?1714/15–75), eldest son of the founder, headed the firm at this time.
7. Curious Productions: Boswell’s collection is now in the Houghton Library. He endorsed it, ‘James Boswell, Inner Temple, 1763. Having, when a boy, been much entertained with Jack the Giant-Killer and such little story-books, I have always retained a kind of affection for them, as they recall my early days. I went to the printing-office in Bow Church-yard and bought this collection, and had it bound up with the title of Curious Productions. I shall certainly some time or other write a little story-book in the style of these. It will not be a very easy task for me; it will require much nature and simplicity and a great acquaintance with the humours and traditions of the English common people. I shall be happy to succeed, for he who pleases children will be remembered with pleasure by men.’ There are two other, later, collections of such chapbooks with this one in the Houghton Library, probably (though not certainly) assembled by Boswell, perhaps during his London visit of 1769 and his trip to Ireland in 1770. But his ambition to write children’s story books was not fulfilled.
1. receipt: This ‘receipt’ is unexplained, but the context here and in the next day’s memorandum (conversations with Dr Boswell and Andrew Douglas) suggests that it may be a medical prescription.
1. to Temp[le]: Temple had written a long letter to Boswell on 10 July, complaining that he missed London and that life at Cambridge was ‘dull uniformity’. ‘Believe me, my dear Boswell, when I tell you, I miss you very much. I am really much distressed at our seperation. With all your imperfections, I do not know any man whom I love so intirely’ (Corr. 6, p. 37). Boswell wrote back this day, ‘Your very kind Letter did me much good. I stood in need of it I assure you. For the want of your conversation and the want of one who could patiently hear mine is no small want’ (ibid., p. 39).
2. Howell’s: Howell’s was in Half Moon Street, Piccadilly.
3. Journey: That is, to Utrecht.
4. Annandale: In Dumfriesshire. Boswell visited Maxwell here in October 1762 during his Harvest Jaunt.
1. good-humoured Man: Boswell reported his conversations with Fordyce (in a letter that has not survived) to David, who wrote to his brother (then in Utrecht), ‘I was much obliged to you for giving me your advice before you left London, as to what way I should follow, after my apprenticeship was out[.] You was so good as to consult Mr Fordyce, I think you said, he is reckoned a very clever sensible young man[.] I hope youll continue your good advices, which I shall endeavour to follow, for I am very sensible in what a friendly manner you have all along behaved towards me’ (13 Oct. 1763; Yale C 465).
1. ride: Most of this memorandum is written in Boswell’s shorthand cipher (doubtless because of the possibility that Bob Temple might get a sight of it in their close quarters). Boswell’s word ‘ride’ may rather have been an attempt in his shorthand at ‘right’.
2. take him down: To Cambridge. Boswell wrote to Temple in a letter begun this day and finished the next, ‘I wish you had him down to Cambridge’ (Corr. 6, p. 42).
3. your purpose: The purpose described in the memorandum for 11 July (to ‘recover {manhood}’).
4. Pay Johnson Shilling: Unexplained.
5. trunk at St Paul’s: Boswell wrote to Johnston on 12 July, ‘I have been buying a travelling trunk, from the famous trunk-maker at the corner of St. Paul’s Church-yard’ (Corr. 1, pp. 87–8). Contemporary directories list two trunkmakers there: James Bryant (d. 1796) and John Clements (d. 1788).
6. letter from Sir David … pleased him much: Dalrymple wrote in a letter of 7 July, ‘It gives me pleasure to think that you have obtained the friendship of Mr. Samuel Johnston. He is one of the best Moral writers which England has produced. At the same time I envy you the free & undisguised converse with such a man. May I beg you to present my best respects to him & to assure him of the veneration which I entertain for the author of the Rambler & of Rasselas. Let me recommend this last work to you, with the Rambler you certainly are acquainted. In Rasselas you will see a tender hearted operator who probes the wound only to heal it. Swift on the contrary mangles human nature, he cuts and slashes, as if he took pleasure in the operation …’ (Yale C 1424).
1. as Johnson desired you should: Explained in the entry for 16 July.
2. Get Lady Mary Wortley & read: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762), poet, letter writer, and political polemicist, whose daughter Mary (1718–94) was Bute’s wife, had returned to London in 1762, after living and travelling in Europe for over twenty years, and before her death in August 1762 she had arranged for publication of her Embassy Letters, written on her way to and in Constantinople (as Istanbul was then known) during the ambassadorship to Turkey (1716–18) of her husband, Edward Wortley Montagu (1678–1761). They appeared posthumously in three volumes (though in an unauthorized edition) in May of this year, and were an immediate success. Boswell might have seen the high praise of them both in the Critical Review, in a review by Smollett, and in the Monthly Review.
3. Mrs. — in Chambers: Boswell leaves no clue to her identity. The ‘in Chambers’ appears to mean his rooms in the Inner Temple. On 13 July he reported his ‘low debauchery with Girls who patrole the courts in the Temple’. Rogering Mrs — may be the ‘mean profligacy’ of ‘yesterday’ to which he refers in his journal entry of 16 July.
4. last time that I drank it: Boswell and Johnson consumed ‘a couple of bottles of Port’ in their night at the Mitre (Saturday 25 June).
5. Manchester Buildings: In Canon Row, Westminister.
1. came first to London: Johnson left his native Lichfield for London in March 1737.
2. a very clever Man: An Irish artist named Ford whom, according to Boswell’s later journals and notes, Johnson had met in Birmingham. Probably Michael Ford (d. 1765), mezzotint engraver and portrait painter. This clever frugal man would be the subject of Johnson’s remark, added later by Boswell in the Life, that ‘On clean-shirt-day he went abroad, and paid visits’ (Life, p. 61).
3. very happy … so good a Plan: Writing many years later for the Life (under the date of 10 April 1778), Boswell noted that Johnson then ‘was much pleased with my paying so great attention to his recommendation in 1763, the period when our acquaintance began, that I should keep a journal; and I could perceive he was secretly pleased to find so much of the fruit of his mind preserved’ (Life, p. 664).
4. No former Sollicitations … lay thee aside: Lord Auchinleck, in his letter of 30 May, had written, ‘When I … came to the Country [i.e. Auchinleck] I found that what I represented woud probably be the consequence of your strange Journals actually had happened. Mr Reid [i.e. the Rev. George Reid] came here[,] informed us he had seen them & having a good memory, repeated many things from them. He made these reflections[,] that he was surprized a Lad of sense and come to age shoud be so childish as keep a Register of his follies & communicate it to others as if proud of them’ (Yale C 214). The journal referred to is Boswell’s Harvest Jaunt journal of 1762, which Boswell had sent to William McQuahe, and which Reid had somehow seen. Lord Auchinleck had also disapproved of this London journal, of Boswell’s sending it to Johnston, and of Johnston himself. In a letter to Johnston of 8 March, Boswell described one from his father (which has not survived, but which Boswell included so that Johnston could read it): ‘You will observe how severe he is upon me. How he treats my scheme of keeping a Journal and sending it down and in what a light he considers you’ (Corr. 1, p. 55). Temple too had recently discouraged Boswell’s journal-keeping (25 May) – advice from Temple which (unusually) Boswell has ignored.
1. don’t go: To Utrecht.
2. Send shirt: Presumably the shirt borrowed from Eglinton and worn as part of his ‘Blackguard’ outfit on the King’s birth-night (journal for 4 June).
3. the late Lord Hervey: John Hervey (1696–1743), styled Lord Hervey, politician and courtier in the era of Sir Robert Walpole, and a memoirist, known for a busy sexual life (with partners of both sexes).
4. Baron Legge: Heneage Legge (1704–59), lawyer and judge, a Baron of Exchequer from 1747.
5. an Appeal from a Court martial: The defendants were seven lieutenants, of whom Robert Temple was one, and three drummers of the 85th Foot, against whom an action was brought for ‘trespass, assault, and false imprisonment’ of another soldier of the regiment, George Dawson. The jury awarded Dawson damages of £300 against three of the lieutenants, but Temple was not one of them (Corr. 6, p. 47, n. 4).
6. Lord Shellburne’s Steward: John Bull (d. 1768), steward (or agent) to William Petty (originally Fitzmaurice) (1737–1805), 2nd Earl of Shelburne and 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, at this time First Lord at the Board of Trade in Grenville’s ministry, and later (1782–3) briefly prime minister. Shelburne was having extensive work done on Bowood House, near Calne, in Wiltshire (the coach route to London from which ran through Hounslow).
7. a type of: A mere prefiguration of.
1. have no whims of days: That is, do not do things, such as choosing his day of travel, out of superstitious or whimsical preferences for particular days. Boswell gave himself a similar admonition in the memorandum for 25 June, and had rebuked himself for such whims in his journal entry for 4 March.
2. a french house: An inn or tavern owned by French proprietors.
3. Ambassador from Tripoli: The St. James’s Chronicle for Saturday 8 January 1763 reported that ‘Yesterday the two Tripoli Ambassadors had their first public Audience of His Majesty at St. James’s, and delivered their Credentials’, but their names are not given. The ambassador from Algiers was Omar Effendi, who had presented his credentials in June 1761.
4. division of territory: Contemporary British geography books listed four ‘subdivisions’ of Africa’s ‘North Division, or Barbary Coast’: Algiers, Tunis, Tripoli and Barca.
5. grand Signior: Mustafa III (1717–74), sultan of the Ottoman Empire from 1757.
6. Shelties: Shetland ponies.
7. a Galloway: A small, strong breed of horse from Galloway (in Scotland’s south-west), larger than the Shetland pony, well suited for riding, especially for beginners. Boswell’s point is that Bute had had little practical political experience before his appointment to high office.
8. Lord Talbot … Lord Steward: William Talbot (1710–82), Lord Talbot, later 1st Earl of Talbot, a member of the Privy Council from 1761. He served as Lord High Steward at George III’s coronation, and was appointed Lord Steward of the Household – a position that Boswell is satirically representing as that of a glorified servant. The ‘crown’ he is given (5 shillings) is, in Boswell’s allegory, double the tip (‘half a crown’) that Eglinton (a lord of the bedchamber) and Bute’s other ‘many Ostlers’ were given.
9. a Colonel of Militia: Wilkes was colonel of the Buckinghamshire county militia.
10. Britons strike home: ‘Britons Strike Home’ was originally from Bonduca (1695), an operatic adaptation of The Tragedie of Bonduca (?1611–14), by John Fletcher (1579–1625), for which Purcell wrote the incidental music. The song’s popularity long survived the opera’s, and remained a part of the British patriotic repertoire, played in times of war, naval battles, and other national crises. Boswell alludes to Wilkes’s populist/nationalist appeal to ‘liberty’.
11. great Zeal blowing the trumpet in Zion: From the Book of Joel: ‘Blow ye the trumpet in Zion, and sound an alarm in my holy mountain: let all the inhabitants of the land tremble: for the day of the Lord cometh, for it is nigh at hand’ (2:1); ‘Blow the trumpet in Zion, sanctify a fast, call a solemn assembly’ (2:15).
12. Sir Harry … a Prologue-maker: That is, Erskine, as a close supporter of Bute, resembling an author making a dedicatory prologue to Bute as a patron.
13. Johny Home … tail: The Rev. John Home, Bute’s private secretary, had been (as noted) the author of stage tragedies.
14. his Bootship: Continuing the equestrian theme (as in riding boots). Bute’s given name (John) and the name of his earldom (Bute) lent themselves to satirical punning by his critics, as in ‘Jack Boot’.
15. sowse: Souse – as an adverb, ‘suddenly, without warning’; ‘with a direct and rapid course’; ‘with strong or violent impact; heavily’ (OED, which notes that the word is now ‘chiefly dialect’).
16. did not seem over fond of this: Eglinton had, of course, been a Bute supporter.
17. parting … in it: Eglinton was to set out early in the morning of 20 July for Scotland.
1. Johnst: Johnson.
2. Turks: The Turk’s Head Coffee House. This one of the name was at 142 Strand, at Catherine Street.
3. Johnston & Temp[le]: To Johnston he wrote a hurried letter (quoted in n. 17 to 27 November), and to Temple a short letter concerned in part with Temple’s father’s difficulties. He also mentioned that, with Bob away in Salisbury, ‘I have now had full & free possession of the Chambers. I like them much’ (Corr. 6, p. 46).
4. begin french: Boswell is intending to study French as he prepares for his European travels. French was much used among well-born and genteel families in Holland and in the German courts in this period.
5. Coll. Ersk[ine]: Unclear which of the several Colonel Erskines known to Boswell is meant here (and again in his memorandum for 31 July).
6. your Religion: Dr John Boswell had left the established Church of Scotland for the unconventional Glasite (or Sandemanian) sect, founded by the Rev. John Glas (1695–1773), and then promoted by his son-in-law, Robert Sandeman (1718–71), committed to the doctrine of salvation by faith.
7. to St. Paul’s Church: This visit to the cathedral actually happened the previous Tuesday (as Boswell reports in his letter to Johnston of that date). By this late point in his London stay, Boswell had fallen well behind in posting his journal.
8. the whispering gallery: This gallery runs around the interior of the cathedral’s dome, and is called so because, it is said, a whisper made against its wall can be heard at the wall on the opposite side.
9. paintings … Cupola: Eight scenes, done in grisaille, from the life of St Paul, by Sir James Thornhill (1675/6–1734).
10. Sir Thomas Robinson: Robinson (1702/3–77), from Rokeby, in Yorkshire, amateur architect and collector, had been governor of Barbados (1742–7) and was at this time a manager of Ranelagh.
11. a Hero … an Author: Frederick – referred to as ‘the Great’ from the time of his Silesian campaigns (of the 1740s) – was an astute and disciplined military commander and strategist who made Prussia a formidable power in the European contests, but departed from his own father’s austere rule, and, a monarch of the Enlightenment, studied philosophy, literature and music (he played the flute), composed (sonatas and symphonies), and wrote poetry and prose, much of it under the pseudonym ‘Philosophe de Sanssouci’ (the name inspired by the name of his summer palace). His works were later collected as Œuvres de Fréderic le Grand in 31 volumes (ed. J. D. E. Preuss, 1846–57).
12. Voltaire’s Foot-boy: Voltaire, with whom Frederick when a young man had begun a correspondence, had been Frederick’s court poet and literary adviser at his palace in Potsdam from 1750 to 1753, and encouraged the King’s writing.
13. Levet: Robert Levet (c.1705–82), an impoverished Yorkshire-born physician who worked among the London poor. Johnson had met him in 1746, and later took him into his household. In 1782 Johnson wrote a moving poem in his memory, ‘On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet’.
14. where Lintot … printing-house: Henry Lintot (1703–58), bookseller, had joined and then succeeded to the business of his father, Bernard Lintot (1675–1736), who had been the most significant English literary publisher of the first third of the century. Boswell changed ‘printing-house’ to ‘warehouse’ for the Life (p. 230).
1. give letter & money: Boswell gave his uncle (who was to leave for Edinburgh by sea on 25 July) a letter to be delivered to Johnston, with the money Boswell owed him – £1 16s. for the shoes, and 11s. for the stocks (Corr. 1, pp. 93–4).
2. Johnston at night: As the rest of the memorandum shows, Boswell is planning a supper this night at his lodgings with Johnson, Dempster and Dr Boswell.
3. Francis: Presumably Francis Barber, whom Boswell met first when he went to visit Johnson on 24 May.
4. his children: The marriage of Anne (Cramond) Boswell (1716–77) and Dr Boswell produced eight children.
5. legal term: The existing Copyright Act (8 Anne, c. 19) stated that copyright in a work held for fourteen years, and if the author was still alive after that period could be renewed for another fourteen. But the London booksellers (‘the trade’) maintained that under common law they held copyright in perpetuity. The question of literary copyright, especially among works by English authors, at this time was a vexed one, especially after the Union of Scotland and England. Donaldson had been issuing cheap reprints of the works of English authors. The matter festered for another decade, and was finally settled (in Donaldson’s favour) on appeal to the House of Lords in 1774. That case, Donaldson v. Becket, in which Boswell participated as one of the counsel, remained the basis of British and American copyright law well into the twentieth century.
6. Rousseau’s plan: In his Discours sur l’origine et les fondemens de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (1755). It had appeared in English translation as A Discourse upon the Origin and Foundation of the Inequality among Mankind in January 1762, and was widely excerpted and reviewed.
7. Sir William Petty: Petty (1623–87), political economist, an important seventeenth-century pioneer of statistical analysis, made estimates of annual family expenditures in his The Political Arithmetic (published posthumously in 1690), and other publications.
8. cæteris paribus: Latin, ‘other things being equal’.
9. Academy … one Man: The Accademia della Crusca, founded in 1582, was the national language academy of Italy and the oldest such institution in Europe, and its first dictionary of the Italian language appeared in 1612. Its use of illustrative quotations preceded Johnson’s similar practice (innovative in English lexicography). A presentation copy of Johnson’s Dictionary had been sent to the Accademia in 1755, and received the praise and thanks of its president, the Marquis Nicolini, who ‘was pleased to say, it was a very noble Work, would be a perpetual Monument of Fame to the Author, an Honour to his own Country in particular, and a general benefit to the Republic of Letters throughout all Europe’ (Public Advertiser, 10 Oct. 1755).
10. had been … the Bashaw: Had been haughty or imperious. A ‘Bashaw’ (variant of ‘pasha’) was a Turkish official or officer of high rank.
1. Let Long-nose & Lord B’s riding be your last printings: Boswell’s last planned publications before leaving for Utrecht. ‘Gilbert Long-Nose: A Scotch character’, a 57-line poem satirizing a lazy, gluttonous, ill-mannered, scrounging fellow, appeared in the Public Advertiser for Saturday 23 July. It was another joint composition. In a letter to Erskine of 26 July (Corr. 9, p. 442) he ascribes it to ‘the united efforts of a Peer, a Member of Parliament, a Letter-writer[,] a Translator, and a Crooked Sixpence’ (i.e. Eglinton, Dempster, himself, James Macpherson and possibly Crookshanks), and in a later undated manuscript list which he headed ‘Parodies’ (Yale M 212) he has noted for the date 23 July, ‘By Dempster[,] Erskine & a little McPherson & me.’ ‘Lord B’s riding’, if actually written and published, has not been traced. It was perhaps to have been based on the account of Lord Bute’s fall, as a fall from a horse, which Boswell described to Eglinton (journal for 18 July). Boswell’s last actual publication before departure was a letter in the Public Advertiser for Thursday 4 August – the day before he will leave London for Harwich to catch the boat to Utrecht – signed ‘B.’ and written from the ‘Inner Temple’, criticizing the mode of conversation among ‘the fashionable part of this Metropolis’. They ‘pass many Hours together, during which they neither talk grave Sense, nor lively Nonsense’. According to the letter, ‘A Gentleman of great Eminence in the Poetical World calls a modern genteel Party, a consensual Obliteration of the human Faculties’ – a reference to Erskine, and the remark Boswell recorded in his journal for 19 December.
2. try to run: Boswell may be planning to ask for Johnson’s opinion of Letters E–B, and of whether he has authorial promise, or perhaps on whether he might try to run for parliament.
3. this day: He wrote a letter to Johnston of this date, recalling to Johnston’s memory various Edinburgh people, places and experiences (the letter was quoted in n. 11 to 30 November), and adding, ‘My Dear friend you can scarcely imagine how happy I am at present. The Temple is a Residence worthy of an Addison or of a genuine Spectator. I am enjoying perfect felicity. But the time is fast approaching, when I must leave dear London, and embark for distant Regions’ (Corr. 1, p. 96).
1. lose none: Boswell is reminding himself to write up in his journal the main topics of his conversation with Johnson in his chambers (journal for 20 July).
2. Hume wrote: Hume’s main writings on religion and theology, beginning with the Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), and advanced in more detail in his Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1748) and his Natural History of Religion (1757), mounted a sustained sceptical critique of rational defences of orthodox religious belief (such as those in the writings of Locke, and of Samuel Clarke, whose works Johnson recommended to Boswell).
3. Plenum … Vacuum: The sense in general is that objections can be raised against the idea either of a universe full of matter, or of one void of matter. These terms were pondered in Aristotle’s Physics.
4. for Miracles: Boswell quotes from memory Hume’s essay ‘Of Miracles’, Part I: ‘The plain consequence is (and ’tis a general maxim worthy of our attention) “That no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falshood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish.” ’ The essay was first published in 1748, in Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding (later titled An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 1756).
5. the Mistress of the house: Ann Smith (d. ?1777). The Rev. James Woodforde (1740–1803) wrote in his diary for 10 April 1775 that he went ‘to the Turk’s Head Coffee House in the Strand opposite Catherine Street, kept by one Mrs. Smith, a Widow and a good motherly kind of woman’ (James Woodforde, The Diary of a Country Parson 1758–1802, sel. and ed. John Beresford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 105).
6. an Orthodox tavern: A jesting reference to the ‘Mitre’ as the headwear of a bishop (thus representative of the established Church of England). Boswell refers in the Life to the pleasing ‘orthodox high-church sound of the Mitre’ (Life, p. 213).
7. and that … by literature: Struck through by Boswell, who noted in his margin, ‘This said in a former conversation’. (In the Life (p. 234), he moved this remark to the record of 20 July.)
8. Mrs. Mcaulay: Catherine (Sawbridge) Macaulay (1731–91), historian and political writer. The first volume of her History of England from the Accession of James I to that of the Brunswick Line appeared this year, a ‘Whig’ history in opposition to Hume’s ‘Tory’ one. Seven further volumes appeared in 1766–83.
9. Thomas Warton … bad thing: Thomas Warton (1728–90), elder brother of Joseph Warton. Johnson had been hosted by him at Oxford during earlier visits there. Later he was Camden Professor of History at Oxford, and a member of the Club, and he succeeded Whitehead as Poet Laureate in 1785. Poet, clergyman, scholar and one of the most considerable and influential historians of English poetry of his time, he was known also for his pranks, squibs, humorous and satiric writings, and taste for low tavern company.
10. western isles of Scotland … with me: The Scottish Hebrides were thought of in London as remarkably remote, and as a curiosity because of the fading of their older clan-based, feudalistic and Gaelic-speaking ways of life since the government suppressions after the 1745 uprising. This is the earliest mention of a plan for this journey, eventually undertaken ten years later. After publication of Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775), and Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson LL.D. (1785), this trip would become one of the most famous of literary journeys, its steps often retraced by later travellers.
11. more so: Writing later in the Life (p. 237), Boswell says that this is an opinion from which he has ‘never yet varied, that a man is happier’. He says that in this conversation he ‘enlarged upon the anxiety and sufferings which are endured at school’. In one of his ‘Ten-Lines-A-Day’ poetry practice exercises kept while in Holland, he will recall ‘the age when I was flogg’d at school’ (26 Oct. 1763; Boswell in Holland: McGraw-Hill, p. 55, Heinemann, p. 54).
12. know his opinion: Boswell relayed Johnson’s high opinion in a lengthy letter to Dalrymple of 23 July.
1. Sr. Dav[id,] Temple[,] Johnston at length: He told Dalrymple today that Dalrymple’s last letter had set his mind at ease about Utrecht, and that he would follow his advice about learning Scots law by studying Erskine’s Institutes and would be assiduous in learning French. He reported in detail on Johnson’s supping with him in his rooms, repeating much that he had recorded in the journal. He hoped to be able to make himself more worthy of the regard of such men as Johnson.
He told Temple too of the supper at his chambers on Wednesday. ‘I had prodigious Satisfaction to find Dempster’s Sophistry (which he has learnt from Hume and Rousseau) vanquished by the sollid sense and vigourous reasoning of Johnson. It was a very fertile Evening; and my Journal is stored with it’s fruits. Dempster was as happy as a vanquished Argumentator could be; and the honest Doctor [i.e. John Boswell] was chearfull and conversable & highly entertained’ (Corr. 6, pp. 47–8).
He told Johnston this day, ‘I am still living in my calm and pleasing chambers in the Inner Temple. I have a thousand agreable ideas which I have formed in my youth of this ancient Seat of Retirement, where so many of the Knights of Jerusalem [i.e. the medieval Order of Knights Templar] have whilome dwelt and where the Spectator’s ingenious friend fixed his residence.’ (In Spectator 2 (2 Mar. 1711), Addison wrote, ‘The Gentleman next in Esteem and Authority among us, is another Batchelour, who is a member of the Inner Temple; a Man of great Probity, Wit, and Understanding.’) Boswell went on, ‘Indeed Johnston this is so very comfortable a life, that I question if I shall ever be happier in any stage of my present Existence. Had I but you and Temple near me, my felicity would be rather too great for mortality’ (Corr. 1, p 98)
2. & show letter: Presumably, show George Home the letter he had just written to Home’s father, Lord Kames.
3. Grange: That is, John Johnston.
1. to mark … youth: Boswell reminds himself to write up in his journal topics from the conversations with Johnson of 19 and 22 July. The ‘egg & Chicken’, among the topics listed, makes no appearance in the journal, or the later Life.
2. Mem too … conversation: Boswell reminds himself to include mention of Goldsmith’s wanting to ‘shine’ in conversation.
3. a Church by Lombard Street: Either St Mary Woolnoth, Allhallows, or St Edmund.
1. Yates: Probably Richard Yates (?1706–96), Drury Lane actor.
2. get bill renewed: Probably the bill for the money owed by Love.
3. high up stairs: Boswell is remembering one of the very tall houses in Edinburgh’s steep Old Town. The Loves’ Edinburgh home (according to Boswell’s journal for 26 October 1762) was at or near Bristo Port.
4. Make Bob … send him down: Boswell wrote to Temple on 26 July that ‘I have advised [Bob] to go down in the Cambridge Fly on Thursday’ (Corr. 6, p. 52). The ring, which Temple said he had from his father, who had had it from his own closest friend, somehow passed from Robert Temple to Miss Temple, and she was evidently not giving it back. In a letter (also of 26 July) which Boswell sent with Robert (on his way to Cambridge), he wrote that Bob ‘has been very eager to get back the ring, but the little cunning Gypsey still keeps it. She is a deceitful little Jade. She ought to be whip’d’ (ibid., p. 53). In reply, Temple wrote, ‘I am much concerned at your not being able to make my name sake restore the ring … If it be possible, I intreat you to get it’ (ibid., p. 59). But Boswell evidently did not see Miss Temple again. The ‘money’ was probably the money which Robert Temple mistakenly thought was due to him from his regiment. Boswell himself was in the end obliged to furnish Bob with some sums of money to clear his London tailor’s bill and other debts (ibid., pp. 52–3).
5. Tuesday write Temp[le] again: Boswell wrote to Temple on 26 July (in the second of his two letters that day), ‘I must soon set out. I can have no excuse for indulging myself in a much longer stay in London. And yet I must own to you, My Dear Friend[,] that I feel a good deal of uneasiness at the thoughts of quitting the Place where my Affection is truly centered, for Here I enjoy most happiness. However, I am determined to go next week. I hope I shall not be feeble-minded, but pluck up manly Resolution, & consider that I am leaving London, in order to see the World, store my mind with more ideas, establish a proper character and then return to the Metropolis much happier & more qualified for a sollid relish of it’s Advantages’ (Corr. 6, p. 54).
6. Rambler … look at letters: That is, Johnson. It does not appear whether or not Boswell in the event gave him Letters E–B.
7. the Robin-hood Society: A debating club, which met each Monday at the Robin Hood tavern, in Butcher Row. It rose to fame when presided over by a prosperous London baker, Caleb Jeacocke (?1705–86), whose nineteen-year tenure ended in 1761.
8. the prejudice against excise: Excise charges had much increased over the course of the century as a source of government revenues, and were widely resented and resisted. Public anger had most recently been refuelled by the increase in cider tax in Dashwood’s Budget.
9. my countrymen … Excisemens’ Posts: The increases in excise meant the creation of greater numbers of excisemen’s positions. Boswell alludes to a common English perception that an inordinate number of Scots place-seekers had been given them.
1. the worthy Doctor … Church yard: Dr Boswell and his nephew continued fond of one another. He recalled this meeting pleasantly in a letter of 17 October 1763 to Boswell, in Utrecht. He assured his nephew that he ‘has never been out of my heart as well as Mem’ry since I left him att the entry to St. Paul’s. One accidental meeting there, & one parting bottle att the Tavern there, I can never forget; & indeed, the whole of one unexpected (to me luckie) meeting att London, will ever be rememb’red by me as one of the most agreeable incidents of my life. As it was then that I had confirm’d to me the former opinions I had conceived very earlie of You’ (Yale C 386).
2. the King’s Arms: The King’s Arms tavern, in St Paul’s Churchyard.
1. his brother Captain George: George Maxwell (?1730–79), at first in the 85th Foot (Bob Temple’s regiment), transferred to the 31st Regiment of Foot when the 85th disbanded. In April 1765 he married Ann Handcock (or Hancocke)(1742–1809), heiress of Twyning Manor, in Gloucester.
1. writing letters: To Temple he wrote, ‘My Dear Temple: I have now fixed tomorrow s’enight, friday the fifth of August[,] for the day of my departure; And on Saturday the Sixth I shall be upon the Channel. Alas! my friend let me disclose my weakness to you. My departure fills me with a kind of gloom that quite overshadows my mind. I could allmost weep to think of leaving dear London and the Calm Retirement of the Inner Temple. I am now launching into the wide world and am to be long at a distance from my dear Temple whose kind and amiable counsel never failed to sooth my dejected mind’ (Corr. 6, p. 57). Temple wrote on 31 July, thanking Boswell for his ‘last favours’ (letters in which Boswell gave his thoughts and advice on the financial plight of Temple and his father, and his thoughts about Bob Temple’s character and future prospects). He continued, ‘They convince me more and more of your intire friendship for me, and must endear you to me as long as I live. My companion, my friend, thou solace of all my sorrows! [M]ust I then lose you, must I, at a time too when I have most need of both, be deprived of your counsel and conversation; of your counsel, which ever advised me to what was best, of your conversation, which even when I desponded most, could sooth my troubled mind, and fill it with pleasing hopes’ (ibid., pp. 57–8). Temple added passionately ardent professions of his love and esteem for Boswell, and his hopes that Boswell would write often to him from Europe.
As well as Temple’s concerns about his own future, his father’s financial failure and Bob Temple’s prospects, Temple and Boswell had other matters in mind (alluded to in later letters but not recorded in the journal or memoranda), such as Temple’s attraction at some time in this summer to Frances Floyer (c.1745–98), Norton Nicholls’s cousin (who in 1770 married John Francis Erskine), and an unnamed ‘beauty’ to whom Boswell made approaches under a ‘gallant’ pseudonym, ‘Sir Charles Boston’ (ibid., pp. 73–4, 87–9).
To Johnston this day Boswell wrote upbraiding him for not having written ‘for many Posts’, and for neglecting in particular ‘a fullfillment of your promise of a particular letter informing me all about my little boy’ (Corr. 1, p. 101). This letter crossed with one from Johnston, received by Boswell on 30 July, on which day he wrote back regretting that he had not received Johnston’s ‘most agreable letter on Thursday giving a particular account of my dear little Son’. Had he received it he would ‘not have written my chiding Epistle to you … You can scarcely beleive what pleasure I received from the description of your Sunday’s visit at the Residence of Charles … I wish from my heart, that I had seen him, before I left England’ (ibid., pp. 102–3). Boswell never did see Charles, who died (probably in early 1764) while Boswell was in Utrecht, which news (received in a letter from Johnston) left him ‘distrest & sunk’ (memorandum, 9 March 1764; Corr. 1, pp. 121–3).
2. breakfasted with me: That is, the day before. Boswell wrote to Temple (26 July, in the letter Bob carried to Cambridge), ‘Love is to breakfast with me, tomorrow. I hope I shall get him to pay me up some more of what he owes me’ (Corr. 6, p. 53). Boswell was in fact hoping to send some of this money to Temple, who was himself short, and was asking Boswell for help.
3. Peggy Doig the Mother of my little boy: Peggy Doig is not certainly identified, but a Doig family genealogy website (http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=doigm&id=I1405) suggests that she is the Margaret Doig born c. 1740, in St Cuthbert’s, Edinburgh (daughter of the late David Doig, wright in Portsburgh), and who in December 1764 married David Angus (b. 1732). The infant, Charles, had been turned over to a foster mother who may have been a woman named Jean White, mentioned by Johnston in a letter to Boswell of 24 February’ (Corr. 1, p. 51). When precisely Boswell saw Peggy in London is not clear. He wrote to Johnston on 23 July that ‘I have seen her and have got fine accounts of my little Boy’ (Corr. 1, p. 98).
4. the Tale of a Tub … usual manner: The Tale of a Tub first appeared, anonymously, in 1704, and its authorship was guessed at and much disputed. Swift’s cousin, the Rev. Thomas Swift (1665–1752), claimed some share in it, but modern Swiftian scholars have rejected this and other such claims and little now remains of the authorship controversy: the work is generally regarded now as entirely Swift’s. Johnson’s opinion of Swift was consistently hostile.
5. Sir Isaac Newton … Beleiver: Newton (1642–1727), physicist and mathematician, along with his brilliant scientific accomplishments, spent much of his life researching theological, biblical and doctrinal questions, and left behind an enormous collection of manuscript writings on these subjects. Johnson may be thinking specifically of Newton’s General Scholium, added to his Principia (1st edn 1687) in 1713, which speaks of the divine design of nature and of God’s continuing sovereignty over it.
6. the University of Salamancha … should not: Alongside ‘that they should not’ Boswell has written in the margin, ‘This he said with great emotion’; but no such official university proclamation has yet been traced. The University of Salamanca, founded 1230, the oldest in the Iberian peninsula, reached the height of its renown in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and after the Reformation was the pre-eminent centre of Catholic theology in Europe. Columbus lectured here on his discoveries. The legal, moral and political consequences of the new geographic discoveries were among the topics pondered by its intellectual theologians (known as ‘The School of Salamanca’). Francisco de Vitoria (c.1483–1546), who held the chair in theology from 1526 and is considered the founder of modern international law, in particular questioned the subjugation and forced religious conversion of indigenous peoples. Johnson may be remembering an episode involving the University of Salamanca reported in Brevísima Relación de la destrucción de las Indias (1552), by Bartholomé de las Casas (1484–1566), which work had been translated into English as The Spanish Colonie, or Briefe Chronicle of the acts and gestes of the Spaniardes in the West Indies, called the newe World, in 1583. In the Valladolid Debate in Spain (1550–51), las Casas, bishop of Chiapas, contended that indigenous peoples were free, and entitled to the same rights as others. His opponent, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1489–1573), defender of the Spanish right of conquest and colonization, argued that the native peoples were natural slaves. According to las Casas’s Brevísima Relación, Sepúlveda sought to publish a work in doctrinal support of the legality of the Spanish conquests and subjugations. Castilian authorities, concerned about the content of the work, sent it to the theologians of the universities of Salamanca and Alcalá for opinions, ‘which Universities after many exact and diligent disputations, concluded, that it might not be printed, as contayning corrupt doctrine’ (The Spanish Colonie). (I owe this reference to Dr John Stone of the University of Barcelona.)
7. King of Bath: Jocular title for the Master of Ceremonies. See the journal for 28 March and n. 5.
8. the crosses: The pedestrian crossings.
9. Greenwich: On the south bank of the Thames, south-east of London, a popular place of excursion along the river.
10. it won’t do: In the Life, Boswell added, ‘He, however, did not treat her with harshness’ (Life, p. 240). In 1757, Johnson assisted Saunders Welch in writing his pamphlet Proposal to Render Effectual a Plan to Remove the Nuisance of Common Prostitutes from the Streets.
11. Mr. Johnson’s Wife: Elizabeth (Jervis) Johnson (1688/89–1752), whom Johnson usually addressed as ‘Tetty’. The pair married in 1735, when he was 25 and she 46, the widow of Harry Porter (d. 1734), a Birmingham mercer and woollen draper, and the mother of three children.
12. Miss Williams: Anna Williams (1706–83) had been a friend of Johnson’s wife, who, before her death in 1752, committed her to Johnson’s care. Her Miscellanies in Prose and Verse, with a preface and other contributions from Johnson, appeared in 1766, published by Thomas Davies.
13. gutta serena: Amaurosis – ‘Partial or total loss of sight arising from disease of the optic nerve’ (OED).
14. a lodging of her own: Her lodgings were in Bolt Court, Fleet Street. She became a member of Johnson’s household again when he moved from his rooms at 1 Inner Temple Lane to Johnson’s Court, off Fleet Street, in 1765, and was a valuable companion to him in his later household in Bolt Court until her death.
1. to humour my Father … plan of life: Lord Auchinleck advised Boswell in his letter of 18 June to reconnect with the Edinburgh legal eminences: ‘[I]t will be proper for you to write to My Lord Advocate a Letter of compliment and to let him know your schemes. A Letter too to My Lord President will be well taken[.] [T]hese are my friends and you may rely on them’ (Yale C 215). Again on 23 July: ‘You may if you think proper write to Lord Advocate [and] Lord President thanking them for all their civilities and telling them of Your having the satisfaction to be more under their eye hereafter and thereaby to have an opportunity to testify your gratitude & regard’ (Yale C 219).
1. the song which Orpheus sung to the Argonauts: Orpheus, legendary Thracian pre-Homeric poet, was said to have sailed in the Argo with Jason on the expedition to recover the Golden Fleece. His song helped the Argonauts resist the lure of the Sirens.
2. Old Swan: A tavern near London Bridge.
3. Billingsgate: Site of London’s great fish and seafood market, on the north bank of the Thames just below London Bridge.
4. took Oars: Were rowed by a waterman along the Thames.
5. vulgar: Common, popular, straightforward.
6. London a Poem: Most of Johnson’s poem London takes the form of an address by the aggrieved poet Thales to a friend. Appalled by the venality and corruption of Walpole-era London, he prepares to board the boat at Greenwich (where Johnson was lodging when he wrote the poem) and retreat to rural Wales.
7. kist the consecrated earth: ‘We kneel, and kiss the consecrated Earth’ (London, l. 24).
8. the building at Greenwich … whole: Greenwich Hospital, a home for old sailors (a match to the Chelsea Hospital for old soldiers), was indeed a grand building. Work had begun on it as a royal palace in the 1660s. The second stage of the work, to the designs of Wren in the 1690s, was completed in the mid eighteenth century.
9. Buchanan … to a Lady: George Buchanan (1506–82), Scottish poet, historian and scholar. The poem in question, according to a note to the Life by Edmond Malone, is in Epigrammata, Lib. ii, ‘In Elizabeth. Angliæ Reg.’. The topic may have come up because Boswell this day purchased a 1660 edition of Buchanan’s Psalmorum Davidis paraphrasis poetica, which he endorsed, ‘I bought this for 2d. at Greenwich when I was walking there with Mr. Samuel Johnson.’ Johnson later paid public tribute to Buchanan in his A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775): Buchanan’s name has ‘as fair a claim to immortality as can be conferred by modern latinity’ (The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vol. 9, ed. Mary Lascelles (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971, repr. 1976), p. 5).
10. Johnston improved upon it: Arthur Johnston (?1579–1641), Scottish physician and poet. The ‘improvement’ upon Buchanan is no. lix of Johnston’s Epigrammata (1632), which complimented Lady Sophia Hay, daughter of the 9th Earl of Errol. Johnson wrote in his Journey that Johnston ‘holds among the Latin poets of Scotland the next place to the elegant Buchanan’ (ibid., p. 15). Johnson greatly admired, and had aspirations to join, the intellectual traditions of late-Renaissance humanist scholarship and literary neo-Latinity (see Robert DeMaria, Jr, The Life of Samuel Johnson (Oxford, UK, and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1993)).
11. country lodgings at Greenwich … Irene: Johnson rented lodgings next door to the Golden Hart tavern in Church Street, Greenwich, in the summer of 1737, soon after his move from Lichfield to London, to try to revise and complete his tragedy Irene.
12. discomposed … excursion: The trip back in fact caused Boswell serious distress. He added in his first draft of the Life, ‘We staid so long at Greenwich that our sail up the river in our return to London was by no means so pleasant as in the morning; for it was dusky and so cold that I shivered in the boat. I was the more sensible of it that I had sat up all the former night recollecting and recording in my Journal the scenes and conversations of the preceding day … Mr. Johnson whose robust frame was not in the least affected scolded me, as if this had been a voluntary effeminacy[,] saying “Why do you shiver?” ’ (Life ms 1, pp. 323–4).
Boswell had stayed up all the previous night not only bringing up his journal, but writing letters too, including one to Dalrymple very early in the morning: ‘I begin this letter in a situation that makes me uncertain when I shall end it, whether at the foot of the first, second, third, or fourth page. Mr. Johnson and I are going upon the water to Greenwich.’ He reported that Frank Barber was to come and call him when Johnson was ready to leave (National Library of Scotland, MS 25295, ff. 19–20v).
13. Harwich: From which the boat to Holland departed. Boswell had booked his passage on the Prince of Wales packet boat. Johnson also had some thought at this time of visiting Boswell the next summer and making a tour of the Netherlands, but nothing came of the plan.
14. the Place: Auchinleck House and its immediate surroundings.
15. I: Johnson himself.
1. Quakers in Lombard Street: Boswell will attend the morning meeting of the Quakers at Devonshire House, near Lombard Street.
2. [ ] turks: A word (the last three letters seem to be day) is smudged and illegible before ‘turks’. Boswell and Johnson will sup at the Turk’s Head Coffee House next Tuesday and Wednesday.
3. Woman’s preaching … at all: In the Life (p. 244), Boswell adds the detail that he had ‘heard a woman preach’ at this Quaker meeting. Women could not train for ministry, and female preachers were unknown in the other Christian denominations at this time, but not among Methodists and the Quakers. The preacher this day was Margaret (Falconer) Bell (?1707–77), who had served since 1758 (Henry J. Cadbury, ‘Dr Samuel Johnson on the Quakers’, Friends Journal 20 (1 Dec. 1974), p. 622). Boswell’s later diaries show that he retained warm feelings about Quakers and Quakerism, including women preachers: he noted twelve years later that he attended a Quaker meeting in London’s White Hart Court (meaning the meeting house in Gracechurch Street), where ‘one man and two women preached very well’ (13 May 1785; Applause, p. 293).
1. Natural Beauty: This item, among the list of topics Boswell reminds himself to write up, does not appear in the journal entry. But in his draft of the Life, he told how, as they walked in Greenwich Park, ‘Mr. Johnson said to me “Is not this very fine?” Having no exquisite relish of the beauties of nature, and being more delighted with “the busy hum of men”[,] I answered “Yes, Sir; but not equal to Fleetstreet.” He answered “You are right, Sir” ’ (Life ms 1, p. 323). ‘Towered cities please us then, / And the busy hum of men’ is from ‘L’Allegro’ (published 1645) by John Milton (1608–74).
2. his going with you: Johnson’s accompanying him to Harwich.
3. Picture in Holland: Perhaps, imagine (‘picture’) his father in Holland (where Lord Auchinleck had studied law as a young man) and model his own behaviour there accordingly. But Boswell may be referring to a picture of himself that Johnston had requested. He wrote to Johnston on 30 July, ‘You are affectionate in asking to have my picture. I dont know of any cheap miniature Painter, here. But I shall get it done either in London, or in Holland and send it to you’ (Corr. 1, p. 103). (The miniature by Lowe, whether or not completed, is not mentioned.) He eventually had a miniature done in Rome in June 1765, by a young Scottish painter, James Alves (1738–1808). It was based on the portrait of him done in Rome in the preceding month by the artist George Willison (1741–97). He would write to Johnston on 19 July 1765, from ‘Monigo (near Venice)’, ‘Before I left Rome I took care to execute your Commission of having my Picture done in miniature … It has been sent off some weeks ago’ (ibid., pp. 174–5). This miniature has not been recovered. The portrait by Willison (who was a cousin of George Dempster’s) was bequeathed in 1913 to the National Portrait Gallery of Scotland.
4. Dogget’s Badge: A rowing race for six young Thames watermen, founded 1 August 1715 by Thomas Doggett (c.1670–1721), Irish actor, and briefly one of the managers of the Haymarket Theatre and later of Drury Lane, to commemorate George I’s accession to the British throne in 1714. In the race that Dempster and Boswell saw this day, ‘Doggett’s annual Coat and Badge was rowed for by six Watermen, from the Old Swan at London-bridge to the White Swan at Chelsea, and was won by Samuel Eggleston, who plies at Paul’s Wharf’ (Public Advertiser, 2 Aug. 1763). More recently, the course of this race has run from the Swan Steps at London Bridge to the Cadogan Pier, east of the Albert Bridge, a distance of about 4½ miles.
1. Sr. D[avid]: Boswell thanked Dalrymple for a lengthy letter of 28 July, in which he had said that Boswell’s last (meaning the letter of 23 July) ‘gives me great pleasure, as it shows me how sensible you are of Mr Johnson’s friendship & how studious you are to deserve it’. Dalrymple endorsed Johnson’s views on the truth of the Christian religion, and quibbled with ‘scepticism’, ‘the gentlemen who call themselves free thinkers[,] rational enquirers and I know not what’, such as Hume, Voltaire and the comte de Buffon. ‘You wish that you could make any return to Mr Johnson for his friendship. The return which you ought to make and which he is entitled to expect from you is that you endeavour to deserve his friendship’ (Yale C 1428). Boswell’s reply this day assured Dalrymple of his sense of the importance of religion, but also discussed his new acquaintance with Wilkes, and noted indeed that his letter was being sent in a frank that Wilkes had provided (National Library of Scotland MS 25295, ff. 21–2v).
2. Treesbank: James Campbell (d. 1776) of Treesbank, an Ayrshire neighbour and friend, and Lord Auchinleck’s cousin. Boswell had learned in letters from McQuhae and his brother David that on 13 August Campbell was to marry Helen Macreadie of Perceton in Ayrshire. In 1768 he married as his second wife Mary Montgomerie (d. 1777) of Lainshaw, sister of Boswell’s wife, Margaret.
3. Johny, Davie: Boswell’s brothers John and David.
4. facetious: Witty, humorous, sprightly.
1. the Convocation … to it’s full powers: The Church of England’s Convocation was its synod, or assembly of the clergy, called together to determine ecclesiastical questions. Boswell noted in his margin here, ‘I mentioned what David Hume had told as to his [Johnson’s] zeal for the Convocation.’ In his ‘Harvest Jaunt’ journal for 4 November 1762, Boswell quoted Hume as saying that Johnson holds ‘the Episcopal Hierarchy in supreme veneration & said he would stand before a battery of cannon to have the Convocation restored to it’s full powers’ (Jaunt, p. 103). Convocation was prorogued in 1717 in the Bangorian Controversy, so called because of a sermon preached before George I by the latitudinarian Benjamin Hoadly (1676–1761), then bishop of Bangor, denying that the Church had doctrinal or disciplinary authority. In the contentious aftermath, planned attacks on Hoadly in Convocation led the King to suspend it. It would not meet again (except formally) until 1852.
1. Memorandum: Undated, but probably written on the day before Boswell’s departure for Harwich. He carried it with him to Holland, and wrote the first of his memoranda there on the same sheet of paper. He wrote to Johnston at close to two in the morning of 5 August that he was to leave London ‘in a few hours’, and ‘am to rise at half an hour after three’. With this letter, he sent Johnston the final instalment of his journal, ‘a packet of Journal, to the last night of my stay in London, making it 734 [actually 736] pages’ (Corr. 1, pp. 106–7).
2. like Lord Chesterfield: Philip Dormer Stanhope (1694–1773), 4th Earl of Chesterfield, was another of the eminent men whom Lord Auchinleck had recently mentioned to Boswell as models for emulation: ‘We are never too old to learn and every sensible man thinks so. When Lord Chesterfield was Embassador at the Hague he took a College from Mr. Vitriarius [Johannes Jacobus Vitriarius (1679–1745)] with whom I was then studying’ (6 July 1763; Yale C 216). Chesterfield’s best-known writings (especially his Letters written by the late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to his son, Philip Stanhope (1774)) were published posthumously, but he had been the author of several anonymous works whose authorship was an open secret. Temple had referred to him in a letter to Boswell of 25 December 1759, using the words of Chesterfield to praise the ‘antient classick’ authors for ‘that love of their country, that contempt of riches, that sacredness of friendship, and all those heroick and social virtues, which have marked them out as the objects of veneration, though not the imitation of succeeding ages’ (Corr. 6, p. 29) – a reference to Chesterfield’s ‘Preface’ to Love Elegies (1743) by James Hammond (1710–42).
1. the Inquisition: The Roman Catholic ecclesiastical tribunal for the detection and prosecution of heresy, which had been particularly severe in Spain. It was still active in Spain and Portugal in the eighteenth century.
2. but myself: Boswell added in his revisions for the Life (p. 245), ‘who knew that he could talk upon any side of a question’.
3. Pomponius Mela de situ orbis: De situ orbis, a short Latin geographical compendium, by the Spanish-born Pomponius Mela, who wrote c. ad 43 (at the time of the emperor Claudius’s invasion of Britain).
4. where we lay: Probably at the White Hart inn.
5. a siege for Charles the First: In the summer of 1648, a royalist army in East Anglia recruiting support for the King, attacked by a parliamentarian force under Lord General Sir Thomas Fairfax (1612–71), retreated behind the Colchester town walls, resulting in a bitter siege of eleven weeks.
6. a favour … tried among us: Not an idiosyncratic opinion. ‘Those that defend this Practice [i.e. torture] urge […] 4thly, Before a Man is brought to the Rack by the Roman Law, the Offence was to be made out with such Evidence as would take away his Life in other Countries if the Crime was Capital’ – Thomas Wood, A new institute of the imperial or civil law. With notes, shewing in some principal cases amongst other observations, how the canon law, the laws of England, and the laws and customs of other nations differ from it (1st edn 1704; 4th edn, here quoted, 1730). (See Jacob Sider Jost, ‘Johnson on Torture: A Legal Footnote to the Life’, Johnsonian News Letter 60, 1 (March 2009), pp. 44–7.)
7. Rambler … Gulosity: Rambler 206 (7 Mar. 1752), the third last that Johnson wrote, meditates in its first half on the impossible aim of maintaining economy while being among the ‘votaries of luxury … relating with rapture the succession of dishes with which their cooks and caterers supply them’, and in its second half it satirizes the fictional Gulosulus, a man of no actual merit or accomplishment who through sly social scheming insinuates himself into the feasts and dinners of the wealthy and great. (Johnson’s Dictionary defined ‘Gulosity’ as ‘Greediness; gluttony; voracity’.)
1. the Church: The Church of St Nicholas (which no longer stands, having been demolished and replaced by a newer Church of St Nicholas, consecrated in 1822).
2. every thing … merely ideal: That is, that objects of external perception consist only in ideas (see n. 2 for 16 February).
3. I refute it thus: Boswell in the Life (p. 248) refers only to Johnson’s having struck his foot forcefully, in this famous and much-quoted moment, against ‘a large stone’ (not disclosing that it was in fact one of the foundation stones of the church).
4. Pere Bouffier: Claude Buffier SJ (1661–1737), Warsaw-born French Catholic theologian and philosopher. In his Traité des premières verités (1717) he argued for first truths as propositions so evident that they cannot be proved, or refuted, by others more evident.
5. Reid and Beattie: Thomas Reid (1710–96) and James Beattie (1735–1803), Scottish authors whose thought (in opposition to that of Berkeley and Hume) Boswell found congenial, and which Buffier’s anticipated. Reid, professor at Aberdeen from 1753 to 1764, succeeded Adam Smith in the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow, and was founder of the Scottish ‘Common Sense’ school of philosophy. Boswell encountered Reid’s An Inquiry into the Human Mind, on the Principles of Common Sense (1764) while travelling in Germany about a year after leaving London, found it ‘a treasure’, and thought that with ‘strong reasoning and lively humour’ Reid ‘drove to pieces the sceptical cobweb’ (19 July 1764; Grand Tour I: McGraw-Hill, p. 28; Heinemann, p. 27). He wrote later that Reid’s Inquiry ‘settled my mind, which had been very uneasy from speculations in the abstruse and sceptical kind’ (16 Sept. 1769; Wife: McGraw-Hill, p. 293; Heinemann, p. 312). Beattie, from 1760 professor of moral philosophy and logic in the Marischal College, Aberdeen, and University of Aberdeen, published his Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth, in Opposition to Sophistry and Scepticism in 1760. An anonymous English translation of Buffier published in 1780, First Truths and the Origin of our Opinions Explained, accused Reid and Beattie of having taken ideas from Buffier.
6. answered by pure reasoning … : Boswell continued with three sentences here referring (anonymously) to the statesman Edmund Burke (1729–97), whom he first met in 1772, and who had intended to write a reasoned refutation of Berkeley, but, to Boswell’s regret, had been distracted by his political career and never undertook it (Life, p. 248).
7. sadly affected: On 23 September, Boswell wrote to Johnston, ‘I set out upon my travels, with a kind of gloom upon my Mind. My enthusiastic love of London made me leave it with a heavy heart’ (Corr. 1, p. 111). On 16 August, he wrote to Temple, ‘Expect not in this letter, to hear of any thing but the misery of your poor friend. I have been melancholy to the most shocking and most tormenting degree’ (Corr. 6, p. 61).