Young Boswell

PREFACE

To write the life of him who was himself the Great Biographer is a task which I have had no thought of attempting in this book. In the course of collecting the letters of Boswell I have come across a good many new incidents in his career, which, it has seemed to me, might perhaps alter, or at least ameliorate, the view generally held of him, and which might properly be made the subject of a group of connected essays. In each essay there is, I think, a good deal of new information, for the sources of which I refer the reader to my forthcoming edition of Boswell's correspondence. But though a large part of my material is new, I have not hesitated to draw also upon older and more familiar matter. The quotations from Boswell's letters to Temple are from the original manuscript, now in the possession of Mr. James Pierpont Morgan, which has not been studied since 1857. I take this opportunity of thanking Mr. Morgan for permitting me to copy it. In using extracts from it I have retained, as elsewhere, Boswell's spelling, but not his punctuation.

To my friend Dr. J. T. T. Brown of Glasgow, who has been a lifelong student of Boswell and who has taken a keen interest in my labours from

their inception, I offer my warmest thanks. Mr. Clement Shorter has kindly permitted me to reprint in Chapter IX a portion of the essay that I contributed to the ninth volume of his edition of Boswell's Johnson, as an introduction to the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

In one way, perhaps, this book may be unique. James Boswell has fared rather badly at the hands of most people who have written about him. For myself, I frankly admit that I have enjoyed my association with him, and that I have had no desire either to patronise him or to sit in judgment on his occasional lapses from social propriety and moral standards. That Boswell was at times a very foolish young man any reader may see; but he was not, I think, so foolish as many of his critics have been. When all is said, he had genius, and of that I have tried to make a sympathetic study, preferring to err, if I must err, on the side of appreciation.

C. B. T.

YALE UNIVERSITY
February 23, 1922.

CONTENTS

I. YOUNG BOSWELL

II. IN HOLLAND AND GERMANY

III. WITH THE FRENCH PHILOSOPHERS

IV. BOSWELL AND WILKES

LISHING