ineffectual
descent in 1719 on Glenshiel with the Spaniards. But in the '45 he had
taken no part, and he revealed to the British Government the existence
of the Bourbon Family Compact. In return, his attainder had been
removed by George II., and on his brief visit to Scotland he had lived
with Boswell's father in Ayrshire, perhaps as a friend of the
Commissioners for the forfeited estates, when the occasion had been
seized by Macpherson for an ode, 'attempted after the manner of Pindar,'
in the fustian style of the translator of Ossian. With him or by his
credentials Boswell went the round of the German courts, passing by
Mannheim and Geneva, reaching the latter towards the end of December.
The reader is struck with the airy assurance and self-possession which
the laureate of the Soapers and the Newmarket Cub manifests on the grand
tour, conducting himself at three and twenty with complete success at
the courts of German princes, conversing with plenipotentiaries and
dignitaries of all sorts in French and Italian, for German had not yet
risen into sufficient historical or diplomatic importance to add to the
linguistic burdens of mankind. Lord Marischal as the governor of
Neufchatel had acted as the protector of Rousseau, and so was able to
furnish his companion with a letter of introduction, hinting at his
enthusiastic nature and describing him to the philosopher as a visionary
hypochondriac. Voltaire he interviewed at Ferney, and he managed to
please the great man by repeating--a characteristic trait of Bozzy, who
believed such tale-bearing to be vastly conducive to the practice of
benevolence--Johnson's criticism upon Frederick the Great's writings,
'such as you may suppose Voltaire's foot-boy to do, who has been his
amanuensis.' He broached the subject of the philosophy of the
unconscious, and was eager to know how ideas forgotten at the time were
yet later on recollected. The other replied by a quotation from
Thomson's _Winter_ with the writer's question, as to the winds,

'In what far distant region of the sky
Hushed in silence sleep ye when 'tis calm?'

The attempt to draw out Voltaire upon the tour to the Hebrides, which
Boswell and Johnson had been vaguely talking over, produced only the
rather sarcastic query if he wished him to accompany them, with a look
'as if I had talked of going to the North Pole.' Of his visit to the
wild philosopher, as he styles Rousseau, we have no notice, beyond the
genera