h so comic a face
That our sides are just ready to split.

Boswell is modest enough,
Himself not quite Phoebus he thinks,
He never does flourish with snuff,
And hock is the liquor he drinks.
And he owns that Ned Colquet the priest
May to something of honour pretend,
And he swears that he is not in jest,
When he calls this same Colquet his friend.

Boswell is pleasant and gay,
For frolic by nature design'd;
He heedlessly rattles away
When the company is to his mind.
"This maxim," he says, "you may see,
We never can have corn without chaff;"
So not a bent sixpence cares he,
Whether _with_ him or _at_ him you laugh.

Boswell does women adore,
And never once means to deceive,
He's in love with at least half a score;
If they're serious he smiles in his sleeve.
He has all the bright fancy of youth,
With the judgment of forty and five;
In short, to declare the plain truth,
There is no better fellow alive.'

This, it must be confessed, is sad stuff even for a laureate of twenty,
and is jesting with difficulty. Every man, says Johnson, has at one time
or other of his life an ambition to set up for a wag, but that a man who
had completed the _Life of Johnson_ should in after years complacently
refer to this character of himself and 'traits in it which time has not
yet altered, that egotism and self-applause which he is still
displaying, yet it would seem with a conscious smile,' is scarcely
credible were it not out-distanced by graver weaknesses.

For about this date he published _An Elegy upon the Death of an Amiable
Young Lady_, flanked by three puffing epistles from himself and his
friends, Erskine and Dempster. In the same year appeared his _Ode to
Tragedy_--by a Gentleman of Scotland, with a dedication to--James
Boswell, Esq.!--'for your particular kindness to me, and chiefly for the
profound respect with which you have always treated me.' We hear of his
'old hock' humour, a favourite phrase with him for his Bacchanalian
tastes, and we find the author limning himself as possessing

'A soul by nature formed to feel
Grief sharper than the tyrant's steel,
And bosom big with swelling thought
From ancient lore's remembrance brought.'

In 1760 had appeared a _Collection of Original Poems_, published by
Donaldson in Edinburgh on the model of Dodsley's _Miscellanies_. It
comp