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for the story of James Boswell is not for you. There are serious and admirable books for those who wish to associate with an author who is consistently modest and dignified, and who, if he indulges in humour, never forgets to maintain a certain propriety, lest the reader call him a fool. But the story of James Boswell is for those who are ready and able to realise that greatness may be linked with folly or, indeed, spring out of it.

If, then, association with the Great on terms of easy intimacy was the ambition of his youth, it was no more than he had a right to feel that he might achieve. He was no social upstart. Nothing could be further from the truth than to conceive of him as coming out of some vague middle class, with a cheap desire to raise himself by catching at the skirts of the eminent. If it were permissible to employ the standards of fine society, it would not be unfair to say that in the association with Johnson it was Boswell who conferred upon the older man the social distinction. A descendant of Robert the Bruce, with the blood of half a dozen earls flowing in his veins, might, it is to be hoped, be pardoned for aspiring to associate with the son of a country bookseller! There was, of course, a difference in age, nationality, and achievement that must be reckoned with; but, allowing for all this, there was no reason why young Boswell

should hesitate to claim his right to enter the most distinguished society of the realm.

His father, Alexander Boswell of Auchinleck, was one of the most prominent members of the landed gentry of Southern Scotland, and an advocate of high distinction. Upon his elevation to the judicial bench, he had assumed, according to Scottish custom, the title of Lord Auchinleck.1 His estate at Auchinleck, in Ayrshire, had been conferred upon his ancestor, Thomas Boswell, by royal grant in 1504. This founder of a long line had been killed in battle at Flodden Field, together with the sovereign who had been his benefactor. Nor was Boswell's descent less distinguished on his mother's side. She was Euphemia Erskine, through whom he might claim kinship with the Earls of Mar and Dundonald. Finally, as he proudly relates, from his great grandfather, Alexander, Earl of Kincardine, the blood of Bruce flowed in his veins.

The estate of the family had been judiciously increased until, in the days of Boswell, the laird of Auchinleck could ride ten miles forward from the door of his house without leaving his own land; upon this vast tract were no less than six

1This title, however, like episcopal titles in England, could not be inherited; neither did it confer upon the holder's wife the privileges of a peeress. Thus Lord Auchinleck's wife remained "Mrs. Boswell."

hundred people, attached to him as overlord. Here Boswell's father had erected a palace declared (upon somewhat doubtful local testimony) to be the work of the Adam brothers, and a worthy centre to the family seat which it dominated. Above the Romanesque portal, in an elaborately carved tympanum, is the Boswellian crest-a hooded fal

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chasms, steep descents to the water, and romantic cliffs. On the banks of the Lugar are the ruins of the original castle, and between these and the house, the remains of a former mansion. Boswell told Johnson that in youth he had "appropriated the finest descriptions in the ancient classics" to certain scenes on his ancestral estates. Years later, when Johnson visited the place, after the tour to the Hebrides, he wrote: "Lord Auchinleck has built a house of hewn stone, very stately and durable, and has advanced the value of his lands, with great tenderness to his tenants. I was, however, less delighted with the elegance of the modern mansion,

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"I was," said Dr. Johnson, "less delighted with the elegance of the modern mansion than with the sullen dignity of the old castle

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