ble person, of whom Boswell's elders must have approved. They must have deemed her an eminently safe person was she not a cousin? She was not a foreign woman, who would introduce a strange note into the society of Auchinleck; she was not wealthy, but she would do. It was really essential to get James married off. Since his return from the Continent, his life had been growing ever looser. There was need of a steady, feminine hand. Therefore, it would seem, they took care to throw him with Margaret, trusting in the effect of propinquity. Even before the expedition to Ireland, Boswell speaks to Sir Alexander of Miss Montgomery as sitting by him while he writes. Sir Alexander himself lent his influence to the plans that the family were working out. He told Boswell that he would find his cousin's conversation "nutritive," and the word pleased the young "Indeed it is such as nourished me," he replied, "and like sweet milk tempers and smooths my agitated mind.”

man.

Mrs. Boswell was one of those kindly, longsuffering women whose lives are a quiet blessing to men; unhonoured by the world, but eternally dear to a few who are privileged to be near them. Through a long wedded life, through years in which bitterness must have been her portion, she was a devoted wife to Boswell. He loved her, and

after her death never ceased, in his own garrulous fashion, to lament her loss.

But her husband's ways were not her ways. His enthusiasms she could not share. It is to be feared that his restless hero-hunting was to her a source of shame. At the very best, it could have seemed no better to her than the eccentric taste of a man who collects exotic animals as pets. "She disapproved," says Boswell, "of my inviting Mr. Msh, a man of ability but of violent manners, to make one in a genteel party at our house one evening. 'He is,' said she, 'like fire and water, useful but not to be brought into company.' Mrs. Boswell was not interested in making social experiments, in mixing different kinds. She would never have seated Samuel Johnson and John Wilkes at the same table. In a word, she never really understood what her husband was about, and never assisted him in developing that very strange variety of genius which Nature had bestowed upon him.

999

Just at the end of Boswell's Commonplace Book there is a sheet headed, "Uxoriana." It is one of the most pathetic pages ever traced by his cheerful pen, for it is his attempt to Boswellise his wife. Its pathos, to my mind, consists in its brevity there are but four anecdotes set down, and they are dull. There was in the lady nothing to

Boswellise. Did he ever, I wonder, in the long dull evenings at Edinburgh and at Auchinleck, let his mind wander back to the Utrecht days, and to a young woman who had told him that she did not have the talent to become a subaltern in his life?

CHAPTER VIII

THE SOCIAL GENIUS OF BOSWELL

I SUPPOSE that the simplest manifestation of social genius is a desire of getting people together and exposing them to one another. Our interest in drama and novel consists largely in seeing people whom we know brought into contact with strange or hostile persons, so that they may exhibit or develop new sides of themselves. It is hard to interest a reader in the unbroken serenities of family life. It is hard for social genius to content itself with the domestic circle. A man endowed with such a genius is perpetually hankering after "new faces, other minds"; he finds in clubs and crowded drawing-rooms a varied and coloured life which puts to shame the modest pleasures of solitude and meditation.

All intellectual improvement arises, perhaps, from submitting ourselves to men and to ways of life that are originally alien to us; if, in time, they get the better of our conservatism, our life is clearly the better for the enrichment they have given it; but if, on the other hand, we are in the end obliged to repudiate them, we retire with the renewed strength that arises from opposition,

and our second state is better than our first. If you happen, for example, to dislike Frenchmen, it would, according to this philosophy, be well for you to go and live among Frenchmen until you discover whether you are right. If you find yourself becoming a snob or a Pharisee, it might be well for you to go among criminals and mendicants, until you realise the fascination of the irregular life. An hour's experience in such matters is worth more than a year of meditations.

Of this philosophy of exposure James Boswell was ever an ardent disciple. He loved friction -the excitement which arises from the sudden contact of rivals, the collision of opponents, illassorted companies: Jove among peasants, Samuel Johnson in the Hebrides. He let his imagination play with the thought of bringing Rousseau and Voltaire together. In his youth he went into the company of actors and of Roman Catholics, because actors and Roman Catholics were not approved of by the stern society in which he had been reared; in his maturer years he courted the acquaintance of the notorious Mrs. Margaret Caroline Rudd, who had barely escaped from the fangs of the law when the Perreau brothers were hanged for forgery; and he rode to the place of execution with the Reverend Mr. Hackman, the murderer.