de of delineation, the intensity of conception
which informs the Finite with a certain Infinitude of significance,
ennobling the Actual into Idealness.'

Openness of mind will do much, but there must be the seeing eye behind
it. For the mental development of Boswell, there is no doubt that, as
with Goldsmith, his foreign travels had done much. As Addison in the
_Freeholder_ had recommended foreign travel to the fox-hunting Tory
squires of his day as a purge for their provincial ideas, Boswell shares
with the author of the _Traveller_ and the _Deserted Village_
cosmopolitan instincts and feelings. 'I have always stood up for the
Irish,' he writes, 'in whose fine country I have been hospitably and
jovially entertained, and with whom I feel myself to be congenial. In
my _Tour in Corsica_ I do generous justice to the Irish, in opposition
to the English and Scots.' Again, 'I am, I flatter myself, completely a
citizen of the world. In my travels through Holland, Germany,
Switzerland, Italy, Corsica, France, I never felt myself from home; and
I sincerely love every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.'
This is the very antithesis to Johnson, whose frank confession was, 'for
anything that I can see, foreigners are fools.'

Yet Boswell's stock of learning was small. 'I have promised,' he writes
in 1775, 'to Dr Johnson to read when I get to Scotland; and to keep an
account of what I read. He is to buy for me a chest of books, of his
choosing, off stalls, and I am to read more, and drink less--that was
his counsel.' The death of his wife forces the confession, 'how much do
I regret that I have not applied myself more to learning,' and he
acknowledges to their common friend Langton that, if Johnson had said
that Boswell and himself did not talk from books, this was because he
had not read books enough to talk from them. In his manuscripts there
are many misspellings. He assigns to Terence a Horatian line and, in a
letter to Garrick, quotes as Horatian the standard _mens sana in corpore
sano_ of Juvenal. More strange is his quoting in a note an illustration
of the phrase 'Vexing thoughts,' without his being apparently aware that
the words are by Rous of Pembroke, the Provost of Eton, whose portrait
in the college hall he must often have seen, the writer of the Scottish
Metrical Version of the Psalms. Yet his intellectual interests were
keen. Late in life he has 'done a little at Greek; Lord Monboddo's
_Ancient Metaphysics_