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images of her lovers, preserved for ever, actual yet golden. Now such a passion as that of Tamar or the Atlantide possessed the innocent soul of James Boswell, biographer. It is a paltry business to think of him as a parasite who attacked but a single victim. Nay, rather, his was the golden hand of the realist who preserves human life in its actuality, yet ever at its best and fullest. And if it be that there mingled with his vision of an Atlantidean circle of the golden great a baser ambition to shine in the reflected light of his splendid victims, who shall begrudge it him? Is not the artist worthy of his fame?

And so John Wilkes, demagogue, "Apostle of Liberty," esteemed the wittiest and the most dangerous man of his day, comes within James Boswell's ken. He is not to be won as were the philosophers. Our artist, however, knows many wiles, and the approach which he will make in this case will be of a quite different kind. But that, to make use of a time-honored phrase, is another story.

[NOTE. In a letter from Horace Walpole to Thomas Gray, written not long after Boswell's encounters with the French philosophers, a pertinent reference to the interviewer's methods, and their effect upon at least one of the interviewed, may be found.

"18th February, 1768

"Pray read the new account of Corsica; what relates to Paoli will amuse you much. The author, Boswell, is a strange being, and, like Cambridge, has a rage for knowing anybody that was ever talked of. He forced himself upon me in spite of my teeth and my doors, and I see he has given a foolish account of all he could pick up from me. He then took an antipathy to me on Rousseau's account, abused me in the newspapers, and expected Rousseau to do so too; but as he came to see me no more, I forgave him the rest. I see he is now a little sick of Rousseau himself, but I hope it will not cure him of his anger to me; however, his book will amuse you."]

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CHAPTER IV

BOSWELL AND WILKES

THE name of John Wilkes has come down to posterity vague, to be sure, but with a definite connotation of evil. There is about it, as there is about that of Paine, a suspicion of brimstone and demagogy. It is derived, perhaps, from that cruel sketch by Hogarth, in which Wilkes is depicted as his enemies saw him, hideously cross-eyed and with his heavy sensual mouth twisted into an evil leer. The artist has contrived to do more than set down in his hard outlines the impression of Wilkes's physical deformity: he has interpreted it as the outward mark of an obliquity of character.

The evil that Wilkes did has lived after him. And yet, if any man of the century had a right to hope that he would survive his contemporary reputation, and be thought of as playing no mean part in the development of British freedom, that man was John Wilkes. With the attempt on the part of George III to drive him out of Parliament we may, in truth, read the story of the last open attempt to exalt the prerogative of the crown over the right of the people to choose their own representatives in the House of Commons. It would seem as if

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John Wilkes

Hogarth's engraving, from a portrait of his own, showing the issues of the North Briton, of which Number 17 contained Wilkes's attack upon the painter and Number 45 led to Wilkes's imprisonment in the Tower

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