and emasculate the letters that he was
employed to publish; an officious prude unquestionably he was, but no
fool, much less an idiot.

To discuss the character of Boswell has ever been a delicate, not to say
dangerous, undertaking; but at least we may affirm that those who,
judging him from the "Life of Johnson," are dissatisfied with the
ordinary, unfavourable view, will not be put out of countenance by these
letters. To be sure they will not be disappointed of the popular
"Bozzy," ridiculous, vain, and a little vulgar, something of a snob, of
a sycophant even, with an undignified zeal for notoriety and an
imperfect moral sense; but beside him they will find another Boswell,
the friend of Hume and Johnson, with his passion for excellence,
generous nature, good understanding, and genius for observation--a man
by no means to be despised. They will see how this man expresses
thoughts and feelings, often sufficiently commonplace, in words so
astonishingly appropriate that we are amazed by the sheer truth of the
self-revelation; and they may even conjecture that some of his
performances, which have been lightly attributed to dull
self-complacency or a defective sense of proportion, are more probably
the effects of a whimsical and fantastic mind through which ran possibly
a queer strain of madness. Be that as it may, we now select for
quotation a few characteristic passages, leaving the reader to decide
for himself when and how far Boswell is laughing at "Bozzy."

The correspondence with Temple, a fellow-student at Edinburgh, began in
1758, when Boswell was eighteen; for the first eight years, however, he
was too busy making acquaintance with Johnson, travelling on the
Continent, and conducting his famous Corsican adventure, to be a very
prolific letter-writer. In 1766 he settled down in Edinburgh to the law,
which he found intolerably dreary, and a love-affair, which he found too
exciting. "The dear infidel," as he called her, besides being another
man's wife, seems to have been an extravagant and disreputable young
woman:

"In a former part of this letter I have talked a great deal of my
sweet little mistress; I am, however, uneasy about her. Furnishing
a house and maintaining her with a maid will cost me a great deal
of money, and it is too like marriage, or too much a settled plan
of licentiousness; but what can I do?

"Besides, she is ill-bred, quite a rompish girl. She debases my