tes Boswell, "has amazing celebrity: Lord Lyttelton, Mr. Walpole,
Mrs. Macaulay, Mr. Garrick have all written me noble letters about it."
With his Lordship's letter he was so much delighted that in the third
edition he obtained leave to use it to "enrich" his book. Johnson
pronounced his Journal in a very high degree curious and delightful. It
is surprising that a work which thus delighted Johnson, moved Gray
strangely, and amused Horace Walpole, can now be met with only in old
libraries and on the shelves of a dealer in second-hand books. I doubt
whether a new edition has been published in the last hundred years. It
is still more surprising when we remember that it is the work of an
author who has written a book "that is likely to be read as long as the
English exists, either as a living or as a dead language." The
explanation of this, I take it, is to be found in the distinction that
Johnson draws between Boswell's Account of Corsica, which forms more
than two-thirds of the whole book, and the Journal of his Tour. His
history, he said, was like other histories. It was copied from books.
His Journal rose out of his own experience and observation. His history
was read, and perhaps read with eagerness, because at the time when it
appeared there was a strong interest felt in the Corsicans. In despair
of maintaining their independence, they had been willing to place
themselves and their island entirely under the protection of Great
Britain. The offer had been refused, but they still hoped for our
assistance. Not a few Englishmen felt with Lord Lyttelton when he
wrote--"I wish with you that our Government had shown more respect for
Corsican liberty, and I think it disgraces our nation that we do not
live in good friendship with a brave people engaged in the noblest of
all contests, a contest against tyranny." But in such a contest as this
Corsica was before long to play a different part. Scarcely four years
after Boswell from some distant hill "had a fine view of Ajaccio and its
environs," that town was rendered famous by the birth of Napoleon
Buonaparte.

With whatever skill Boswell's history had been compiled it could not
have lived. There were not, indeed, the materials out of which a history
that should last could have been formed. The whole island boasted of but
one printing press and one bookseller's shop. The feuds and wars of the
wild islanders might have lived in the songs of the poet, but were
little fit for the p