25, 1768, we find him writing: 'I myself am never absent from a publick
execution. When I first attended them, I was shocked to the greatest
degree ... convulsed with pity and terror. I feel an irresistible
impulse to be present at every execution, as there I behold the various
effects of the near approach of death.' The parallels of Charles V.,
Philip II., Philip IV., Charles II. of Spain, will not escape the
reader, and strangely, or rather naturally enough, Boswell is found
disagreeing with the censure pronounced by Johnson on the celebration of
his own obsequies in his lifetime by Charles V. In the _St James'
Gazette_ of April 20, 1779, he is found actually riding in the cart to
Tyburn with Hackman, the murderer of Miss Ray, and writing to the papers
over the feeling of 'unusual Depression of Spirits, joined with that
Pause, which so solemn a warning of the dreadful effects that the
Passion of Love may produce must give all of us who have lively
Sensations and warm Tempers.' But he suddenly deviates into business
when he adds that 'it is very philosophically explained and illustrated
in the _Hypochondriack_, a periodical Paper, peculiarly adapted to the
people of England, and which comes out monthly in the _London Magazine_,
etc.' In his Corsican tour we had seen him interviewing the executioner
in the island, and some days before his final parting with Johnson he
had witnessed the execution of fifteen men before Newgate and been
clouded in his mind by doubts as to whether human life was or was not
mere machinery and a chain of planned fatality. These cravings are
clearly the marks of a mind morbidly affected and diseased, the result
of the Dutch marriage as Ramsay believed. All through his life Boswell
is conscious of his 'distempered imagination,' and the letters to Temple
are scattered with irrelevances and repetitions, fatuities and
inconsistencies that can be explained only on the score of mental
disease. Were any doubts possible on this point, the expressions of his
opinions on religion would dispel them. His 'Popish imagination,'
quickened as it may have been by the escapade with the actress, was but
the natural outcome of an ill-balanced mind. His feelings about
consecrated places, _loca solennia_ such as Iona, and Wittenberg, Rasay
and Carlisle, we have seen. He delighted, says Malone, in what he called
the _mysterious_, leading Johnson on ghosts, and kindred subjects. He
was a believer in second sight: 'it