really possess, or possess in a
lower degree than they fancy. They are always acting a part, and become
touchy from a half-conscious sense of the imposture. But Boswell seems
to have had few such illusions. He thoroughly and unfeignedly enjoyed
his own peculiarities, and thought his real self much too charming an
object to be in need of any disguise. No man, therefore, was ever less
embarrassed by any regard for his own dignity. He was as ready to join
in a laugh at himself as in a laugh at his neighbours. He reveals his
own absurdities to the world at large as frankly as Pepys confided them
to a journal in cypher. He tells us how drunk he got one night in Skye,
and how he cured his headache with brandy next morning; and what an
intolerable fool he made of himself at an evening party in London after
a dinner with the Duke of Montrose, and how Johnson in vain did his best
to keep him quiet. His motive for the concession is partly the wish to
illustrate Johnson's indulgence, and, in the last case, to introduce a
copy of apologetic verses to the lady whose guest he had been. He
reveals other weaknesses with equal frankness. One day, he says, "I
owned to Johnson that I was occasionally troubled with a fit of
narrowness." "Why, sir," said he, "so am I. _But I do not tell it_."
Boswell enjoys the joke far too heartily to act upon the advice.

There is nothing, however, which Boswell seems to have enjoyed more
heartily than his own good impulses. He looks upon his virtuous
resolution with a sort of aesthetic satisfaction, and with the glow of a
virtuous man contemplating a promising penitent. Whilst suffering
severely from the consequences of imprudent conduct, he gets a letter of
virtuous advice from his friend Temple. He instantly sees himself
reformed for the rest of his days. "My warm imagination," he says,
"looks forward with great complacency on the sobriety, the
healthfulness, and worth of my future life." "Every instance of our
doing those things which we ought not to have done, and leaving undone
those things which we ought to have done, is attended," as he elsewhere
sagely observes, "with more or less of what is truly remorse;" but he
seems rather to have enjoyed even the remorse. It is needless to say
that the complacency was its own reward, and that the resolution
vanished like other more eccentric impulses. Music, he once told
Johnson, affected him intensely, producing in his mind "alternate
sensations of patheti