your administration.' This letter 'hastily
written upon the spur of the occasion is already too long,' yet he calls
upon his countrymen to allow him to 'indulge a little more my own
egotism and vanity, the indigenous plants of my own mind.' His whole
genealogy, Flodden and all, we hear over again. 'If,' he pertinently
adds, 'it should be asked what this note has to do here, I answer to
illustrate the authour of the text. And to pour out all myself as old
Montaigne, I wish all this to be known.' After a eulogy of himself as no
time-server, and his profession of readiness 'to discuss topicks with
mitred St Asaph, and others; to drink, to laugh, to converse with
Quakers, Republicans, Jews and Moravians,' he exhorts his friends and
countrymen, in the words of his departed Goldsmith, who gave him many
Attic nights and that jewel of the finest water, the acquaintance of Sir
Joshua Reynolds, 'to fly from petty tyrants to the throne.' He declares
himself a Tory, but no slave. He is in possession of an essay, dictated
to him by Dr Johnson, on the distinction between Whig and Tory, and
concludes with _eclat_, 'with one of the finest passages in John Home's
noble and elegant tragedy of _Douglas_.'

No condensation of this, the most 'characteristical' of all his
writings, can give the reader any idea of this extraordinary production.
Once only does it deviate into sense when, on the last page, we find the
advertisement of the _Tour to the Hebrides_, 'which was read and liked
by Dr Johnson, and will faithfully and minutely exhibit what he said was
the pleasantest part of his life.'

In the Hilary Term of 1786, he was called to the English bar, feeling
it, as he said, 'a pity to dig in a lead mine, when he could dig in a
gold one.' Johnson had always thrown cold water on the idea, though as
early as February 1775, as we find from a letter of Boswell's to Strahan
the printer, the idea had been proposed to him. In the May of 1786 he
writes to Mickle, the translator of the _Lusiad_, that he is in a
wavering state; he has the house of his friend Hoole, and he still
retains the use of General Paoli's residence in Portman Square. When he
did finally take up his own quarters in Cavendish Square, the result was
not what he had expected. He was discouraged by the want of practice,
and the prospect of any. In fact, he was to feel what, as Malone says,
Lord Auchinleck had all along told his son, that it would cost him much
more trouble to hid