'After breakfasting with Paoli,' he writes
before leaving for the north, 'and worshipping at St Paul's, I dined
_tete-a-tete_ with my charming Mrs Stuart, of whom you have read in my
Journal. We dined in all the elegance of two courses and a dessert, with
dumb waiters, except when the second course and the dessert were
served. We talked with unreserved freedom, as we had nothing to fear. We
were _philosophical_, upon honour--not deep, but feeling, we were pious;
we drank tea and bid each other adieu as finely as romance paints. She
is my wife's dearest friend, so you see how beautiful our intimacy is.'
But from Johnson's letter to Mrs Thrale we see looming ahead a crisis.
'He got two and forty guineas in fees while he was here. He has by _his
wife's persuasion and mine_ taken down a present for his
mother-in-law,'--an error, doubtless, for 'stepmother.' He had entered
himself this time at the Temple, and Johnson was his bond. He left to be
in time for practice before the General Assembly, finding 'something low
and coarse in such employment, but guineas must be had'--a feeling quite
different from that of Lord Cockburn who thought the aisle of St Giles
had seen the best work of the best men in the kingdom since 1640.
Perhaps his feelings on this point were soothed by the traveller in the
coach, a Miss Silverton, an 'amiable creature who has been in France. I
can unite little fondnesses with perfect conjugal love.' Alas for poor
Peggie Montgomerie, 'of the ancient house of Eglintoun,' blamed by his
father for not bridling the follies of his son, waiting, doubtless,
anxiously for the present to the second wife of his father as a means of
peace-offering!

Then the secret leaks out that the father had refused Boswell's plan of
being allowed L400 a year and the trial of fortune at the London bar.
His debts of L1000 had been paid, and his allowance of L300 threatened
with the reduction of a third. The promise under the old yew had not
been kept; the one bottle of hock as a statutory limit had been
exceeded, he had been 'not drunk, but was intoxicated,'--a subtle point
for bacchanalian casuists, and very ill next day. He lays it on the
drunken habits of the country which, he says, are very bad, and with the
recollection of Burns' temptations in Dumfries we may admit that they
were. His father, too, was now about to entail his estate, and Bozzy's
predilection for feudal principles and heirs male brought things to a
deadlock. He