What Blest Genius?

Boswell did not make it to Stratford in time for the serenades. It was not the fault of the traffic so much as absentmindedness induced by a combination of anxiety and sexual tension. Having started out in a rush of excitement, he had made it as far as Oxford before realizing that he had mislaid his watch, his money, and the letter from his cousin Margaret accepting his offer of marriage. Virtue was to blame. Since his betrothal, Boswell had promised himself he would become more vigilant against the sexual urges that had dogged him since childhood. There had been many such resolutions throughout his life, reached after long bouts of self-analysis and morning after penitent morning. He was an expert at fresh starts and vows that, starting tomorrow, he would be a better Christian, more resolute and stronger than the desires that perpetually unskinned him. On Monday, he began anew, and by Sunday, had let himself down again, a cycle of failure and recrimination that brought him to the brink of despair. One night, he and Samuel Johnson had watched a moth fly into the flame of a candle. “That creature was its own tormentor,” said Johnson, “and I believe its name was Boswell.”

As a student in Holland, Boswell had sought to better know himself by writing daily memoranda addressed in the third person, observing his behavior in the disinterested style of Mr. Spectator: “you labored hard yesterday”; “persist firm and noble”; “spend not so much time in sauntering”; “if the day is good, put on your scarlet clothes and behave with decency before fair lady.” When he failed to uphold the high standards of conduct and piety he set for himself, he would write stern prescriptions for improvement, telling himself to get more exercise or wear a nightcap in order to preserve his teeth and thus avoid an unattractive lisp. He wrote extensively on the best kinds of breeches, the need to perfect his French, and guarding against prattling “too foolishly and too freely.” The memoranda culminated in a piece Boswell titled the “Inviolable Plan,” a three-page document composed on October 16, 1763, that was “to be read over frequently” as it set out the steps required “to form yourself into a man.” The plan required Boswell to be sober and studious in defense of his family’s reputation, avoid sarcasm and self-aggrandizement, uphold the Church of England, and pursue the path his father had laid out for him in the legal profession to become a member of Scotland’s Faculty of Advocates. Every Saturday morning he went over it, reinforcing his will by reciting to himself, “Your great loss is too much wildness of fancy and ludicrous imagination. . . . The pleasure of laughing is great. But the pleasure of being a respected gentleman is greater.”

One year on, following the conclusion of his legal studies and granted license by his father to travel, Boswell arranged to meet Jean-Jacques Rousseau, sending him, by way of introduction, another introspective text. This “Sketch of My Life” was the companion piece to the “Inviolable Plan,” but whereas the first was intended to shore up his resolve, its sequel looked to understand the source of his frailties. It was searching and confessional, an exercise aimed at identifying a path to reconciling the warring aspects of his personality. In Rousseau, he was meeting the master of this style, then hard at work on his Confessions, a masterpiece of self-scrutiny that would mark a significant evolution in the language and structures of introspection with which Europeans were able to examine their inner lives.

As a cartographer of the interior life, Rousseau had towering appeal. “O great philosopher, will you befriend me?” wrote Boswell in his journal, “Am I not worthy? I tell you that the idea of being bound even by the finest thread to the most enlightened of philosophers, the noblest of souls, will always uphold me, all my life.” Pilloried in his native France and banished to Geneva, the great philosopher was unfortunately not in the best of spirits or health, experiencing constant pain from a urethral stricture that required the frequent and unsatisfactory use of a chamber pot and the need to administer a dilator to his penis to relieve the discomfort. Visitors were strictly limited to fifteen minutes at a time, which Boswell, ever persistent and unrelenting in the face of rejection, successfully bartered up to twenty minutes and then twenty-five over the course of the next few days. As the young Scot shared his struggles and burning desire to make something of himself, Rousseau replied in a distinctly Johnsonian fashion. “Yes,” he said. “Your great difficulty is that you think it so difficult a matter.”

It is true that Boswell had a difficult time reconciling himself to being Boswell. He thought too much and worried about how he seemed and acted to others and what he said and did. Sex especially disturbed his equilibrium. On the way to Stratford, while changing coaches at the Angel Inn at Oxford, he had recalled the effort it had taken him to resist the attentions there of the beautiful Miss Reynolds, refusing the invitation to sleep with her and contenting himself instead with drawing his hand “gently along her yellow locks,” and encouraging her to become a milliner. Pressing on with his journey intending to post the last forty miles to Stratford, the darkness made him uneasy. As he left the town and jolted through the open country, the pleasant residue of resolve gave way to a fear that the flat terrain might encourage some agile young highwayman to jump on the step of his carriage, hold a pistol to his chest, and demand his money. Slipping his purse, watch, and letter from Margaret into the upholstery, he allowed himself to relax and to think about the effect he would create in Stratford with his “fine, striking appearance.”

Sleepily, he changed carriages at Woodstock and again at Chipping Norton. It was hours before he realized what he’d done. Beside himself, he retraced his steps all the way to Woodstock, where the innkeeper handed him his missing effects. By now it was past six in the morning. Angelo had fired his volley and Dibdin’s musicians had started their procession through the town but Boswell was still miles away, stranded. “Such crowds had passed that there was no post-chaise to be had,” he wrote. “Here then was I, on the very morning of the Jubilee, in danger of not getting to it in time.” Increasingly agitated, he hired two horses and a postilion to carry his bags and set out on horseback. The rain fell like nails. With no boots and a borrowed coat, he splashed off toward Stratford, with water filling his buckled shoes, carrying nothing but a small traveling bag, a musket without ball or powder, and a staff with a looping handle representing the bird of Avon. The clouds hung damp and low, breaking infrequently to reveal the comet, blue and livid, its tail as sharp as the blade of a sword.

After six miles of riding, Boswell managed to find a post chaise, and “partly by threatenings, partly by promises, prevailed on the post-boys to drive fast.” At last he reached Stratford, only to be turned away from the White Lion and be sent instead to the house of Mrs. Harris, who lived across the street from the Shakespeare birthplace. There he rented “a tolerable old-fashioned room with a neat, clean bed at a guinea a night, the stated Jubilee price.” Without changing, he went immediately to Holy Trinity Church, where Garrick had led his guests to hear Judith, an oratorio to be performed in the chancel by the full orchestra of Drury Lane. The performers obscured Shakespeare’s grave, set in the floor behind them and marked with a plain stone inscribed with a curse against any who would demote his remains to the charnel house when space was needed for new graves: “Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare / To dig the dust encloased heare / Bleste be ye man y^t spares thes stones, / And curst be he y^t moves my bones.” In a niche on the north wall overlooking the grave was a waist-length bust of the poet supported by black marble columns. To some, its rudimentary execution made it look as if it belonged more to a pub sign or coconut shy than a temple of British worthies. Eva Garrick and the singer Mary Barthélémon had attempted to cheer it up by festooning it with garlands of flowers and evergreens, although the effect, wrote The Gentleman’s Magazine, left Shakespeare looking more like the god Pan than the genius of British literature.

Boswell arrived just before the performance began, his bedraggled hair falling about his ears, his legs and back splashed with mud. Seeking out Garrick, he struck a pose, shook him warmly by the hand, and passed him a note that asked him not to reveal his true identity but simply state that he was “a clergyman in disguise.” The conceit was Boswell’s attempt to delay his formal entrance until such time as he could be sure it would flatter his own sense of celebrity. That he was a “clergyman” was a joke, no doubt, about his worshipful intentions and resolution to be chaste.

With Boswell settled, the oratorio began with a bustling overture of violins that scrambled furiously up and then down to meet the coppery thumps of the harpsichord that punctuated every musical thought. Based on the apocryphal story of the beautiful widow Judith of the Judean city of Bethulia besieged by Assyrians, it related her visit to the Assyrian camp and meeting with their general, Holofernes, who entertains her with a banquet and is lulled into sleep by her singing. As the Assyrian king rests his head in her bosom, Judith, “drawing from its sheath his shining faulchion,” decapitates him, fleeing the camp and displaying his head from Bethulia’s city walls. The music was by Thomas Arne, another collaborator with whom Garrick had a difficult relationship, with the latter accusing the manager of speaking ill of him. Arne had only recently lost his wife, “so young and so blooming,” which made his participation particularly difficult. He was a professional, however, and his performers were some of the most elite in Britain, including the Midlands-born Joseph Vernon; Samuel Champness, who had been trained by Handel; and a popular singer and actress, Sophia Baddeley, who came to Stratford alongside her estranged husband, Robert, an actor and singer. François Barthélémon, husband of the singer Mary, provided a solo on his violin; a young performer from Bordeaux with a serious interest in mysticism and alchemy, his first London appearance had been on the same bill as an eight-year-old Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Although it was the first formal event of the Jubilee, Judith bore no obvious connection to Shakespeare. The piece had not been specially commissioned and neither was it especially notorious or successful on the London stage, having been performed only a couple of times before—most notably, at a benefit for the New Lock hospital, an institution that specialized in the treatment of venereal diseases. It was seen there by the preacher John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist Church, who wrote that “some parts of it were exceedingly fine; but there are two things in all modern pieces of music which I could never reconcile to common sense. One is, singing the same words ten times over, the other, singing different words by different persons at one and the same time.” Garrick’s friend Joseph Cradock didn’t like it much either. “The choruses were almost as meagre as the appearance of the audience,” he wrote, “and I felt much hurt of all that were engaged to perform in it. The company of any rank had not half arrived; and an Oratorio was but a cold introduction to a tumultuous Jubilee.” Boswell, still damp and steaming from his journey, nonetheless allowed himself to be overcome with pious thoughts, regretting only “that prayers had not been read, and a short sermon preached. It would have consecrated our jubilee to begin it with devotion, with gratefully adoring the supreme Father of all spirits, from whom cometh every good and perfect gift.”

The performance concluded, Garrick led the guests out through the churchyard and along a loop through town and back toward the Rotunda. As they walked, Mr. Vernon sang:

This is the day, a holiday! A holiday!

Drive spleen and rancour far away,

This is the day, a holiday! A holiday!

Drive care and sorrow far away.

They stopped at the house in which Shakespeare was born. “Here Nature nurs’d her darling boy,” sang Vernon:

From whom all care, and sorrow fly,

Whose harp the muses strung:

From heart to heart let joy rebound,

Now, now, we tread enchanted ground,

Here SHAKESPEARE walk’d, and sung!

The procession paused to look around the birthplace, there to be greeted by the owner, an old woman who had recently changed her name to Shakespeare in an effort to claim descent. The house inspired invention, just as earlier that summer Garrick had visited in the company of William Hunt and declared, based on nothing but his intuition, that the large room at the front of the house was the room in which Shakespeare had been delivered into the world. Such decisive specificity was much appreciated by the visitors, since “the Joy and the Satisfaction which they felt at being in the very Room in which the great Man was born,” reported the Public Advertiser, “exceeds all Description.” Filing through the birth room, a wooden cave of warped walls plastered with a mixture of mud and hair, they were greeted near the exit by the smiling face of Thomas Becket, a bookseller who had set himself up with a large supply of books and pamphlets including An Ode upon Dedicating a Building, and Erecting a Statue, to Shakespeare, the piece that Garrick would debut the following day, as well as a collection of the Jubilee songs written by Garrick, Dibdin, Bickerstaff, and others that they had been hearing as they walked around. Also for sale were printed portraits of Garrick and Shakespeare and a commemorative issue of The London Magazine containing twin biographies of both men.

The crowd was now beginning to fill out. At three o’clock, there was a public “ordinary” in the Rotunda, a meal at which the guests were given the first opportunity to see inside the building. Despite the panic there had been to finish it, they found it hard to believe that something so beautiful could be fashioned entirely from wooden boards. Garrick’s rotunda was only twenty feet smaller in diameter than the one that had inspired it at Ranelagh, with a large, hexagonal roof supported by a circular colonnade of Corinthian columns, in the middle of which hung a chandelier of eight hundred lights. To enter, guests passed through a wide curtained doorway topped by a pediment surrounded by brilliant lamps arranged in the shape of the imperial crown of England. Smaller colored lights served as its gold and jewels. From there, they moved into a large covered space in which tables had been set for the meal, at the end of which was a raked stage large enough to seat the Drury Lane orchestra. The imposing effect was made all the more piquant by the knowledge of its transience. “It would make a lover of art sigh,” wrote one attendee, “to think how soon it would be demolished.”

As the guests took their places, a stream of waiters appeared from field kitchens constructed on either side of the building to collect money and dispense drinks. The orchestra began to play. Boswell greeted some friends—Benjamin Victor, the actor John Lee, and William Richardson the printer—before taking a seat with a group from Edinburgh comprised of Dr. John Berkeley, whom Boswell may have known as a student, and the actors James Love and his wife, a woman with whom Boswell had had an affair with eight years earlier, using the cipher “Φ” to record their assignations in his diary. Mrs. Love was at least twenty years Boswell’s senior, and there is reason to believe that their affair took place with the full knowledge and even consent of her husband, who pressed Boswell for several loans at the time. Boswell, however, chose not to dwell on the past. The party included a woman from Ireland named Mrs. Sheldon, “a most agreeable little woman,” he wrote, who after only a few minutes’ conversation he could feel “was stealing me from my valuable spouse.”

For a person determined to behave himself, the Jubilee was a lair of temptations. “Wenches!” wrote one traveler. “Never was any paradise so plentifully or beautifully inhabited as here at this time.” This sentiment would have pleased Garrick, who had himself boasted to William Hunt, “I find we shall have all ye Beauties at ye Jubilee.” The whole was conducive to an amorous spirit, which the Public Advertiser picked up on when it reported that “last Night, the fat Landlady at the Red Lyon fell out of a Hayloft into the Manger while she was practising the Chamber Scene in Romeo and Juliet with one of the Candle-Snuffers.” Others were there to find a good match. Joseph Cradock had sent his wife’s sister, Miss Stratford, a “very good young Lady, with a fortune of £12,000,” to lodge at the house of Mr. Evetts the baker, hoping that three days of festivity might produce a husband. The courting mood was summarized in verse by Francis Gentleman:

Miss Tripsy expecting that Stratford will prove

A delicate region of pleasure and love;

Puts on her best face,

Adon’d with each grace,

As ready to bill, and to coo as a dove.

To the market, old dowagers also repair,

With borrowed complexions, teeth, eye-brows, and hair;

Each woos with her purse,

For better for worse,

The female that’s wealthy must surely be fair.

James Boswell wanted only to be good and, intuiting the threat posed by Mrs. Sheldon, he excused himself and moved closer to the orchestra, where Sophia Baddeley sang. Among the most popular performers of the day, Baddeley had been born Sophia Snow, the only daughter of Valentine Snow, sergeant-trumpeter to George II. Her father had trained her for royal service, but at the age of eighteen she met the handsome actor Robert Baddeley, who lodged above a nearby shop. Robert had been a cook before entering the service of a young nobleman as he embarked on the Grand Tour. Travel had polished his manners and given him an aristocratic deportment that was perfect for the stage. Twelve years Sophia’s senior, he persuaded her to elope and subsequently arranged for her to be taken on at Drury Lane, where she made her debut as Ophelia in Hamlet in 1764. They shared four pounds a week.

Sophia Baddeley was not an especially good actor, but she had a winning personality and an outstanding voice. She was also very beautiful, a combination of qualities that made her broadly appealing to the audience at large: “one admired her person, another her voice, and a third her acting.” According to the Irish playwright Hugh Kelly’s poem Thespis: Or, a Critical Examination into the Merits of the Principal Performers Belonging to Drury-Lane Theatre—a useful survey, delivering in rhyming couplets an assessment of every player in Garrick’s company—Sophia Baddeley’s appeal grew the more one watched her:

Yet of such gifts, tho’ happily possest,

She rather grows, than rushes on the breast,

And rather minds the passions to her course,

Than strives to storm them by immediate force;

Hence, in the soft and tender walks along,

Her latent fund of talents must be shewn.

To be so prominently featured at the Jubilee in both Judith and again in the Rotunda was a sign of Baddeley’s professional rise. She had been much in demand of late, acting at Drury Lane, but also singing at the Haymarket Theatre and in various pleasure gardens including Ranelagh, Vauxhall, and Finch’s Grotto, performing popular songs of pastoral love with titles like “My Jockey Is the Blithest Lad.” At Ranelagh alone she had supplemented her Drury Lane pay with an additional salary of twelve guineas a week, an inflated number explained by the fact that its proprietor, Thomas Robinson, was in love with her. He was one of many, including George Garrick, who would find himself fighting a duel to defend her honor. Her husband, Robert, more of a pander than a partner, was quick to exploit her appeal, arranging for her to have an affair with a banker named Mendez in return for a loan of three hundred pounds. Once Sophia had been admitted to Mendez’s company, however, Robert accused her of having “committed an act that deterred her from going back to her own house,” and they stopped talking. More suitors followed, among them the king’s brother, the Duke of York, and Sir Cecil Bisshop, a gentleman in his late sixties who brought her a silver tea service worth one hundred pounds on condition that she invite him to tea.

At the time of the Jubilee, Baddeley had just emerged from a particularly unpleasant scandal, when, in an effort improve her acting, she had taken lessons from the actor Charles Holland. Holland was a handsome Drury Lane journeyman who had been trained by Garrick himself in the hope that he would be able to take the great man’s place as his retirement loomed. The result was that Holland came to be viewed as a mere Garrick impersonator: “GARRICK the body, HOLLAND but the shade.” He was the same age as Robert Baddeley and, like him, a serial seducer, even getting himself sued for criminal conversation by one William Earle, steward of the Royal Hospital at Chelsea, holder of the Commissaryship of the Musters, and a shareholder in the Covent Garden theatre; this lawsuit ensued after the landlady in whose house Holland arranged his assignations admitted that she had bored a hole in a closet so she could spy on him with Earle’s wife, testifying that she had seen him unbuckle his sword, kneel on the carpet, lift Mrs. Earle’s skirts above her head, and kiss her naked knees. Once again, George Garrick was involved, this time called as a witness to affirm that certain incriminating letters had been written in Holland’s hand. Holland and Sophia conducted their affair in secret due to the fact that he was betrothed to an actress named Jane Pope. All this had ended, however, when he and Sophia were found in a compromising position on a boat moored not far from Garrick’s house.

When Baddeley’s song was finished, Lord Grosvenor rose to make toasts to both Garrick and Shakespeare, leading the revelers in three cheers and passing around a cup made from mulberry from which the company took sips. As they drank, Joseph Vernon sang a song in the mulberry cup’s honor:

Behold this fair goblet, ’twas carv’d from the tree,

Which, O my sweet SHAKESPEARE, was planted by thee;

As a relick I kiss it, and bow at the shrine,

What comes from thy hand may be ever divine,

All shall yield to the Mulberry-tree,

Bend to thee,

Blest Mulberry,

Matchless was he

Who planted thee,

And thou like him immortal be!

Grosvenor was another of Sophia Baddeley’s former lovers, with his own scandal unfolding as the Jubilee went on. Immediately prior to setting out for Stratford, he had received a mysterious letter; signed by “Jack Sprat,” it claimed that his wife, Henrietta, was having an affair with another of the king’s brothers, Henry Frederick, the Duke of Cumberland. The eldest daughter of the MP for Bedfordshire, Henrietta possessed “a good person, moderate beauty, no understanding, and excessive vanity,” according to Horace Walpole, who was perhaps turned off by her acute love of fashion and hair tête de mouton. She had first met her future husband in Kensington Gardens after an unexpected downpour had cleared the paths and sent everyone running for shelter. Having found the safety of an arbor, she and her friend were joined by a tall, confident man who impressed Henrietta enough that when he offered her a ride home in his carriage, she accepted. It turned out to be the most comfortable and elegant equipage she had ever seen.

Grosvenor had the good fortune to be the grandson of Sir Thomas Grosvenor, whose marriage in 1677 to the twelve-year-old daughter of a cow farmer had made him the sole proprietor of seventy acres of London marshland between Tyburn Lane and the river Thames, land that by the 1720s had been developed into the elite enclave known as Mayfair. With its wide streets and stone-clad buildings organized around a large square named for the Grosvenors themselves, Mayfair quickly became home to aristocrats looking to escape the miasmic purlieus of Soho and Covent Garden. By the time Grosvenor and Henrietta married in the summer of 1764—she nineteen, he thirty-three—he was one of the richest men in England. Wealth was not accompanied by happiness, as Grosvenor was more interested in horse racing than in his wife. When not traveling the country visiting racetracks and stables, he visited prostitutes at a London hotel owned by a man named French George. The idea that his wife might be similarly unfaithful, however, threw him into a rage, and having heard the rumors, he confronted her as she was “lying in,” having delivered his son just a week earlier. Henrietta sat in bed with her milliner beside her going through letters, but as soon as Richard demanded to see them, she tore the letters to pieces. They were from Duke Frederick, then cruising to Gibraltar on the aptly named Venus, from which he sent poorly spelled notes that made fun of Lord Grosvenor, calling him “Mr. Croper,” after the leather strap that passes under a horse’s tail to keep the saddle from slipping forward. Grosvenor failed to get his evidence then, but he would continue to keep a close watch on his wife for the rest of the year, all the while planning an elaborate trap.

With all the infidelity and erotic charge that surrounded him, Boswell was struggling. He had moved away from Mrs. Sheldon, only to gaze “steadfastly at that beautiful, insinuating creature, Mrs. Baddeley of Drury Lane.” In the case of Baddeley, he knew enough of himself to understand how fleeting attraction can be:

What I feared was love was in reality nothing more than transient liking. It had no interference with my noble attachment. It was such a momentary diversion from it as the sound of a flageolet in my ear, a gay colour glancing from a prism before my eye, or any other pleasing sensation. However, the fear I had put myself in made me melancholy. I had been like a timorous man in a post-chaise, who, when a wagon is passing near it, imagines that it is to crush it; and I did not soon recover the shock.

Tired from his journey, he turned to God. “I recollected my former inconstancy, my vicious profligacy, my feverish gallantry, and I was terrified that I might lose my divine passion for Margaret, in which case I am sure I would suffer much more than she. I prayed devoutly to heaven to preserve me from such a misfortune.”

Boswell had internalized the tension between sex and piety at an early age. When, as boy, he sat high up in the trees that ringed his father’s estate at Auchinleck, the sensation of shinning up tree trunks gave him a powerful feeling:

Already in climbing trees, pleasure. Could not conceive what it was. Thought of heaven. Returned often, climbed, felt, allowed myself to fall from high branches in ecstasy—all natural. Spoke of it to the gardener. He, rigid, did not explain it. In love at age of eight. . . . I knew about the rites of Venus. But unfortunately I learned from a playmate the fatal practice. I was always in fear of damnation. I thought what I was doing was but a small sin, whereas fornication was horrible.

Having graduated from arboreal frottage to actual masturbation, he was so disturbed by what he dubbed “the Cyprian fury” that he considered the example of Origen, the first-century religious ascetic who had lopped off his penis as a guard against the lures of carnal passion. The complicated welter of guilt and passion similarly characterized his love for the actress Mrs. Cowper, and his subsequent decision to run away and convert to Catholicism. As his sexual experience grew, the polarities of sex and piety bent to meet each other, each encounter convincing him that he had found evidence of divinity in sensuality, with sex providing access to the sublime by putting a fearful, timid boy from Auchinleck in touch with his essential masculinity. “In my mind, there cannot be higher felicity on earth enjoyed by man than the participation of genuine reciprocal amorous affect with an amiable woman,” he wrote. “There he has a full indulgence of all the delicate feelings and pleasures both of body and mind, while at the same time in this enchanting union he exults with a consciousness that he is the superior person. The dignity of his sex is kept up. These paradisial scenes of gallantry have exalted my ideas and refined my taste.”

Sex soothed him and he became unable to think of it as anything other than proof of God’s perfection, as something that made him feel more “humane, polite, generous.” There were repercussions, of course. His first visit to a London prostitute, the “Paphian Queen” Sally Forrester, resulted in a dose of venereal disease which took ten stubborn weeks to cure. Having returned to Edinburgh in the summer of 1760, he began courting in earnest, spending time with up to a dozen eligible young ladies whom he would audition for marriage at heavily chaperoned teas. At night, he spent time with girls of a different kind. Determined to keep out of the stews as much as possible, his sexual partners at this time numbered only four—two actresses, Mrs. Brook and Mrs. Love; Jean, the illegitimate daughter of Lord Kames; and a “curious young pretty” named Peggy Doig. Whenever he could, he would see two of them in a day, proudly recording his exploits in ciphers: “rogered Φ forenoon, and P afternoon.” In December 1762, Peggy Doig delivered his child, a boy named Charles. Boswell had plans for the boy, but he died at the age of fifteen months, before he had even a chance to see him. Soon enough, Boswell experienced the discharge and telling blotches that signaled his second dose of venereal disease, considerably worse than the first and resulting in a testicle that remained horribly swollen for four months. It was one of the worst experiences of his life, the memory of which plagued him with nightmares for years in the form of a dream in which his surgeon, Andrew Douglas, peered over his genitals saying, “This is a damned difficult case.” Determined never to repeat the affliction, he bet three of his friends a guinea that he would remain infection free for the next three years.

On his return to London in 1762, Boswell tried hard to resist prostitutes, despite being surrounded by all kinds “from the splendid Madam at fifty guineas a night, down to the civil nymph with white-thread stockings who tramps along the Strand and will resign her engaging person to your honour for a pint of wine and a shilling.” A night at the theatre was frequently combined with a hired coupling. Having failed one night to get into Covent Garden due to the crowd, he ducked into St. James’s Park to have sex with Nanny Baker before paying half price to catch the afterpiece at Drury Lane. Often the quality of one performance informed the other. After seeing Charles Holland in a disappointing production of Macbeth, he took “a little girl into a court” but failed to get an erection.

Soon enough he met the actress Louisa Lewis, with whom he had first become acquainted when she acted in Edinburgh. Louisa was twenty-four, taller than Boswell, with a good sense of humor and seductive eyes. She liked the same things he did, or at least enough to pass the time when they weren’t making love. Within a few short days of their first assignation, Boswell “began to feel an unaccountable alarm of unexpected evil: a little heat in the members of my body sacred to Cupid.” While watching a play that was “acted heavily,” he felt his testicle swell again, accompanied by a scalding heat. At first, he hoped it was just a “gleet” occasioned by too much venery, but an accompanying discharge confirmed the infection as gonorrhea. Boswell was furious. “Thus ended my intrigue with the fair Louisa,” he wrote, “which I flattered myself much with, and from which I expected at least a winter’s copulation.” Having bet his friends that he could stay infection free for three years, he lost the wager in under three months.

Illness was an opportunity to reform his ways, and never one to do things halfheartedly, he renounced licentiousness and decided to read all 4500 pages of David Hume’s History of England. The book was not sufficient to abate the fever and self-pity that descended on him frequently, at one point inducing him to write to Louisa to ask for five guineas in compensation. The number five resonated throughout his sickness—it was the number of times he and Louisa slept together, the number of weeks his malady took to cure, and the number of guineas it cost to cure it.

Following this ordeal, Boswell took greater care to always carry his “armour,” condoms he purchased from the Green Canister in Half Moon Street, a shop specializing in “implements of safety for gentlemen of intrigue,” run by an ex-prostitute named Constantia Phillips. Always capable of ignoring his own best advice, he didn’t always wear one. Having picked up “a fresh, agreeable young girl called Alice Gibbs” at the end of his street, he took her down an alley, where “she begged that I might not put it on, as the sport was much pleasanter without it.” Meeting Samuel Johnson prompted him to be chaste again. “Since my being honored with the friendship of Mr. Johnson,” he wrote, two months after meeting him for the first time while drinking tea in the back room of Mr. Davies’s establishment in Russell Street in May 1763, “I have more seriously considered the duties of morality and religion and the dignity of human nature. I have considered that promiscuous concubinage is certainly wrong.” In a separate memorandum, he wrote, “Swear to have no more rogering before you leave England except Mrs. —— .”

Studying in Holland was a chance to cement his chastity, which of course faltered as soon as he left the Low Countries and entered the orbit of John Wilkes. As his tour came to a close, he confessed to Rousseau, telling him “I should like to have thirty women,” a Boswellian harem that he could marry off to the local serfs as soon as they bore his children. “If you want to be a wolf,” answered Rousseau, “you must howl.” The philosopher went on to recommend a life of chastity and spiritual reflection, including more time spent with his father bonding over healthy pursuits like grouse shooting.

Having read of the death of his mother in an English newspaper in January 1766, Boswell prepared to leave Rousseau to return to Auchinleck. He agreed to escort Rousseau’s mistress, Marie-Thérèse Levasseur, to London, where she was to go to Hume’s house and await Rousseau’s arrival. On the second day of travel, they shared a bed, but Boswell, distraught with grief, found himself unable to perform and started weeping. Thérèse, who was only three years younger than his mother, consoled him. The next night they tried again. This time Boswell was more pleased with his performance and boasted to Thérèse of the sexual prowess of the Scots. “I allow that you are a hardy and vigorous lover,” she answered, “but you have no art,” and offered to provide him tutelage. For someone who used sex to bolster his sense of masculinity, thanehood, and self-worth, the idea of playing the submissive role of a student intimidated Boswell greatly. He stayed up deliberately late reading, delaying going to bed until she began to insist, at which point he paced up and down asking questions about Rousseau. Unable to delay any longer, he drank a bottle of wine and began the lesson. Her advice was simple—be ardent but gentle, don’t hurry, use your hands—but so much of it was new to him and so novel that he doubted her qualifications as a teacher, even to the extent that he thought she wasn’t doing it right when she climbed on top of him and began to move “like a bad rider galloping downhill.” In the ten days of journey between Paris and Dover, they had sex thirteen times.