a good deal of
partial praise, as you are one of those extraordinary authors that have
a love for their own works, and also one of those still more
extraordinary ones that can flatter another. I find fault with one or
two things in your letters; I could wish you wrote in a smaller hand,
and that when you end a sentence in the beginning of a line, you would
begin the next sentence in the same line.

Dear Boswell, go to Donaldson and tell him he is a most inhuman
miscreant, and deserves, as he is a Printer, to be pressed to death;
then thunder in his ear that he has not sent Captain Erskine his
Critical Review.

Lady B---- entreats that you would come here and spend the Christmas
holidays; she has sent for two Highland bards to entertain you, and I
have a wash-ball and a stick of pomatum much at your service: we are
all, thank God, in general pretty clear of the Itch just now, and most
of us not near so lousy as we used to be, so I think you may venture. I
received your letter ten days after the date, though it only came from
Edinburgh; I had wrote you one some little time before, directed to the
Parliament-Close, have you got it? That you may never want Odes of mine
to parody, I enclose you one to Fear,[24] nothing like it you will
observe since the time of Pindar.

[Footnote 24: This Ode is not worth reprinting.--ED.]

And now, my dear dear Boswell, I conclude, having, as I hope for mercy,
not one word more to say, which I believe is often the case of many an
enormous genius.

Farewell. Yours, &c.,

ANDREW ERSKINE.

* * * * *

LETTER X.

Edinburgh, Dec. 8, 1761.

Dear ERSKINE,--It is a very strange thing, that I James Boswell, Esq.,
"who am happily possessed of a facility of manners,"--(to use the very
words of Mr. Professor Smith,[25] which upon honour were addressed to
me. I can produce the Letter in which they are to be found) I say it is
a very strange thing that I should ever be at a loss how to express
myself; and yet at this moment of my existence, that is really the case.
May Lady B---- say unto me, "Boswell, I detest thee," if I am not in
downright earnest.

[Footnote 25: Adam Smith. Boswell had attended his classes on Moral
Philosophy, when a student in the University of Glasgow.--ED.]

Mankind are such a perverse race of beings, that they never fail to lay
hold of every circumstance tending to their own praise, while they let
slip every circumstance tending to