Queensbery,
the patron of Gay, was one of those to whom he was recommended now that
he inclined to 'persist in his fondness for the Guards, or rather, in
truth, for the metropolis,' but he suspected some arrangement between
his father and the Duke by which the commission was delayed. For some
months he spent a random life as the occupier of Temple's chambers in
the vicinity of Johnson. Little could be expected of the friend of
Churchill and Wilkes, yet Boswell now was at the turning point of his
career.

'This is to me,' he writes in his great work, 'a memorable year; for in
it I had the happiness to obtain the acquaintance of that extraordinary
man whose memoirs I am now writing; an acquaintance which I shall ever
esteem as one of the most fortunate circumstances of my life.' We have
seen how Lord Hailes, had on the 1758 circuit, mentioned to him the name
of Johnson; how in Glasgow Gentleman had given him a representation of
'dictionary Johnson;' how Derrick in 1760, during his first visit to
London, had promised to introduce this youth of twenty to the great
dictator of literature; and Sheridan, the father of the dramatist, when
in Edinburgh in 1761, giving public lectures on elocution, had made a
similar promise. But on his return to London at the end of 1762, Boswell
had found that Sheridan had quarrelled with Johnson, and Derrick had
retired to Bath as master of the ceremonies in succession to Beau Nash.
Luckily Derrick had before introduced his friend to Davies, the
bookseller in Covent Garden, who as 'one of the best imitators of
Johnson's voice and manner' only increased the ardour of Boswell for the
meeting. Now the hour was come and the man. Yet surely never could there
have been a more apparently unpropitious time chosen. Number 45 of the
_North Briton_ denouncing Bute and his Scotch favourites had appeared on
April 23rd. The minister had bowed to the storm and resigned, while the
writer of the libel had been arrested under a general warrant and
discharged on the 30th of the month under appeal, either to be hanged,
thought Adam Smith, or to get Bute impeached in six months. Alexander
Cruden, of _Concordance_ fame, was rambling over London in his lucid
interval like an inverted Old Mortality, busy with a sponge obliterating
every hated '45' scrawled over the walls and every conceivable spot in
the city against his country. Yet at such an hour it was that the famous
meeting of Johnson and his biographer took p