'O Larghan Clanbrassil, how sweet is thy sound,
To my tender remembrance as Love's sacred ground;
For there Marg'ret Caroline first charm'd my sight,
And fill'd my young heart with a flutt'ring delight.

When I thought her my own, ah! too short seemed the _day_
For a jaunt to Downpatrick, or a trip on the _sea_;
To express what I felt, then all language was vain,
'Twas in truth what the poets have studied to feign.

But, too late, I found even she could _deceive_,
And nothing was left but to sigh, weep, and _rave_;
Distracted, I flew from my dear native shore,
Resolved to see Larghan Clanbrassil no more.

Yet still in some moments enchanted I find
A ray of her fondness beams soft on my mind;
While thus in bless'd fancy my angel I see,
All the world is a Larghan Clanbrassil to me.'

On this journey with Boswell there was a Margaret--his own cousin, and
it is curious to find him in this mood of sentimental philandering, were
it no worse, when we have now to see Bozzy at the end of his love
affairs. When his great work was completed in 1791, its author
contributed to the _European Magazine_ for May and June a little sketch
of himself, in order to give a fillip to its circulation. There he
describes jauntily his Irish tour, and after what we know of his erratic
course, it is delightful to come across this sage chronicler of his dead
wife, circulating testimonials to her excellences, to which no doubt he
was oblivious in her lifetime. 'They had,' he writes, 'from their
earliest years lived in the most intimate and unreserved friendship.'
His love of the fair sex has been already mentioned (he had quoted the
song of 'the Soapers' in our first chapter), and she was the constant
yet prudent and delicate _confidante_ of all his '_egarements du coeur
et de l'esprit_.' This we may doubt, and the gracefully allusive French
quotation reminds us of Mr Pepys' use of that language when his wife
was in his mind. This jaunt was the occasion of Mr Boswell's resolving
at last to engage himself in that connection to which he had always
declared himself averse. In short, he determined to become a married
man. He requested her, with her excellent judgment and more sedate
manners, to do him the favour of accepting him with all his faults, and
though he assures his readers he had uniformly protested that a large
fortune had been with him a requisite in the fair, he was yet 'w