others. Moreover, there were deposited the notes of his conversations and his manifold memorabilia - a treasure of documents for the life of the times. The collection must have been shown to many a visitor to Auchinleck in the latter days; but literary visitors, alas, were few; and none has recorded any description of it. When it perished, there disappeared for ever materials out of which Boswell, had he lived, might have woven the story of his association with Wilkes. Compared with the "Life of Johnson" such a story would have been a mere sketch; but it would have been a sketch from a master-hand. There would have been in it, moreover, an élan, a hilarity, a love of mischief and impudence, that could not, by the nature of Boswell's relations with Johnson, appear in the great "Life." There would have been, in short, more fun. But, because Boswell was a genius, there would have been something more— a vivid characterisation of Wilkes, done by a man who loved him but had no illusions about him, a man who had penetrated into the inmost secrets of his life, yet had remained unaffected by his political views. It might not have been a definitive study of eighteenth-century radicalism, but it would have been Wilkes. His name would have been in no danger of disappearing from the minds of men. The decree of fate (and Hogarth), by

which his demagogy has been subtly emphasised in the minds and memories of men, might then have been altered by the work of a greater artist than Hogarth, and John Wilkes, the gay and fascinating John Wilkes, might have been remembered for something other than the evil that he did.

CHAPTER V

BOSWELL AND HIS ELDERS: LORD AUCHINLECK SIR ALEXANDER DICK, GENERAL PAOLI

BOSWELL was one of those unusual young persons who deliberately and by preference seek out the companionship of men twice their age. His three most celebrated friends, Wilkes, General Paoli, and Samuel Johnson, were, respectively, thirteen, fifteen, and thirty-one years older than he. His two favourite friends in Scotland, Sir David Dalrymple (Lord Hailes) and Sir Alexander Dick, were, respectively, fourteen and thirty-seven years older than he. Association with younger men he found vivacious but profitless; their conversation was not such as a man would care to record. In his friendship with older men there was always an attempt to gain, as it were at secondhand, all the treasures of a long experience. When the atmosphere became too rarefied, he could always sink back again to the more primitive type of comradeship. In one of his early letters to Sir David, soon after the acquaintance with Johnson had begun, Boswell wrote:

I must own to you that I have for some time past been in a miserable unsettled way, and been connected

with people of shallow parts, altho' agreeably vivacious. But I find a flash of merriment a poor equivalent for internal comfort. I thank God that I have got acquainted with Mr. Johnson. He has done me infinite service. He has assisted me to obtain peace of mind.

We should all do well, I think, to rid our minds of the familiar conception of Boswell as lost in an ecstasy of hero-worship and breathless with adulation; and to think of him, rather, as getting from his association with his elders a double portion of life, enjoying the fruits of experience without sacrificing the avidity of youth. He was, as it were, buying experience in the cheapest market; and to him a full and rich experience of life was the summum bonum.

Because of this desire for a varied experience, he was ever, when with older men, putting himself in an attitude not so much of worship as of inquiry. What did the actual experience of life have to say in answer to the thousand questions that crowded his eager, restless mind? If his elders had attained serenity, it must have been by finding some answer to these thousand disturbing questions. If not, whence rose their peace of mind? Thus Boswell habitually teased Johnson on the subject of the freedom of the will, not, I think, because he conceived of him as a greater philosopher than any who had ever touched on the subject, but because,

seeing Johnson's comparative mastery of the business of living, he was most desirous of knowing what solution of the problem had appealed to him as acceptable. If one could actually extract from association with his elders a body of philosophy, tested by personal experience and illustrated by personal anecdote, what an education it would be! He has himself made the matter clear, in his "Tour to Corsica":

The contemplation of such a character [as Paoli], really existing, was of more service to me than all I had been able to draw from books, from conversation, or from the exertions of my own mind. I had often enough formed the idea of a man continually such as I could conceive in my best moments. But this idea appeared like the ideas we are taught in the schools to form of things which may exist, but do not; of seas of milk and ships of amber. But I saw my highest idea realised in Paoli. It was impossible for me, speculate as I pleased, to have a little opinion of human nature in him.

For this reason, again, he was perpetually seeking advice. Indeed, the seeking of advice became with Boswell, as it does with many of the young, what is euphemistically termed a "habit." Demanding advice of one's elders is not infrequently merely a means of calling attention to oneself. The seeker presents himself, alternately, in the actual and the ideal rôle, and his self-love is flat