THE CONTINENT--CORSICA. 1763-66
'That's from Paoli of Corsica.'--GOLDSMITH, '_The Good Natured
Man_.'
'Utrecht,' writes Boswell, 'seeming at first very dull to me after the
animated scenes of London, my spirits were grievously affected.' But the
depression was not destined to last, and soon we hear of his having
wearied of the proposed two years' course of study. The custom of legal
training in some of the universities of the Continent was about this
time coming to a close, though for long it had remained usual, at least
with the landed classes of Scotland, to secure such an extended field of
study for the bar by an attendance at some of the more developed schools
of jurisprudence in Holland. Cunningham, the celebrated critic of
Bentley, had given prelections in Leyden, and no reader of the _Heart of
Midlothian_ will forget the laments of the inimitable Bartoline
Saddletree over his not being sent to Leyden or Utrecht to study the
Institutes and the Pandects. Since the days of Gilbert Jack at Leyden,
the connection between Holland and the Scottish universities had been
close, and the garrets of Amsterdam had been crowded before the
Revolution by refugees from both Scotland and England who maintained,
upon their return, the ties they had contracted in their exile. Even
Fielding had been sent to Leyden for law, and just before the visit of
Boswell, to which his father had consented rather as a compromise than
from any practical benefit that might ensue, the law of Scotland,
largely based on Roman and feudal precedents, had received fresh
extensions of conveyancing and other branches of jurisprudence, through
the mass of forfeited estates brought into the market after the
suppression of the Jacobite Rebellions. What country, then, could so
rapidly afford such a course of legal study as the Protestant and
commercial Holland? The reputation of Boerhaave had drawn medical
students from all quarters, and Boswell's uncle John, and the celebrated
Monro _primus_ of the Edinburgh Medical School had been among the
number. Goldsmith in 1755 met Irish medical students there, and some
twenty years before the time we have reached Carlyle of Inveresk had
found in Leyden 'an established lodging-house' where his countrymen,
Gregory and Dickson, were domiciled, and numerous others, among whom he
expressly mentions Charles Townshend, Askew the Greek scholar, Johnston
of Westerhall, Doddeswell, afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer, and
John Wilkes then entering, at eighteen, on the career of profligacy that
was to render him notorious. Carlyle describes their meetings at each
other's rooms twice or thrice a week, when they drank coffee, supped on
Dutch red herrings, eggs and salad, and never sat beyond the decent hour
of twelve. For such a style of living Boswell's annual allowance of L240
was certainly handsome in a place where the fuel, chiefly peat, was the
only expensive item.
But such a quiet style of life was not congenial to the lively tastes of
our traveller. He soon tired of the civil law lectures of Professor
Trotz, and longed for fresh woods and pastures new. He sighed to be
upon his travels again. Of his life abroad some isolated notes may be
gathered from the _Boswelliana_, and, as has been mentioned, he sought
out his relatives at the Hague 'of the first fashion,' the Sommelsdycks,
and with his facility of manners, and his father's credentials to the
_literati_ and scholars of the place, his circle of acquaintance was
large and influential. We hear of an intimacy with the Rev. William
Brown, minister of the Scottish congregation at Utrecht, the father of
Principal Laurence Brown of Marischal College, Aberdeen; and with Sir
Joseph Yorke, whom he met later in Ireland, then the Ambassador at the
Hague, he would appear to have been acquainted. But Sir Joseph does not
seem to have welcomed the easy manners of his young friend, and the dull
life of the burgomasters was little suited to Boswell who ridicules
their portly figures and their clothes which they wore as if they had
been 'luggage.'
The two years' course of study was abruptly reduced to one. At its close
we trace him at Berlin in July 1764, and in close relations with the
British Envoy at the Prussian Court. Fortunately for Boswell this was
both a countryman and a friend of his father's, Sir Andrew Mitchell, the
late M.P. for the Banff Burghs. By the Ambassador he was introduced to
the best society in the capital, and from Berlin he wrote to his father
representing the urgent necessity of extending his travels, and, till
the letter in reply should arrive, he proceeded into Hanover and
Brunswick. On his return to Berlin towards the end of August he found a
letter waiting him from Lord Auchinleck, who was naturally chagrined at
the breakdown of his scheme of compromise. A visit to Paris he was
prepared to allow, but the return of the wanderer to Utrecht was
peremptorily commanded. The family of the Envoy was now at Spa, but
next day Boswell wrote him a letter urging him to intercede with his
father for the proposed extension. The letter is a very long one, and
its abridgement even is impossible here, but few more Boswellian
productions can be found. He has, he tells Sir Andrew, a melancholy
disposition, and to escape from the gloom of dark speculation he has
made excursions into the fields of folly, and in this tone of the
Preacher in _Ecclesiastes_ he rambles on. The words of St Paul, 'I must
see Rome,' he finds are borne in upon him, and such a journey would
afford him the talk for a lifetime, the more so that he was no libertine
and disclaimed all intentions of travelling as _Milord Anglois_, but
simply as the scholar and the man of elegant curiosity. Did not Sir
Andrew as the loved and respected friend of his father think that the
son had a claim to protest before he considered any act regarding
himself as passed, and would not the Envoy remonstrate or persuade the
father as to the justice of his wish? No reply was sent to this, but the
judge, thinking that discretion was the wiser part in circumstances
where it was useless to dictate without the means to enforce compliance,
yielded reluctant consent to the scheme of an Italian tour. Gravely then
does Bozzy rebuke Sir Andrew and for this occasion he forgives him, 'for
I just say the same to young people when I advise. Believe me,' he
somewhat irrelevantly adds, 'I have a soul.'
Fortune followed him wherever he turned. George, tenth Earl Marischal,
and brother of Frederick the Great's general, Marshal Keith, had joined
the Earl of Mar in the rising of 1715, and had made an 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
general remark that they had agreed to differ alike in politics and
religion, but that there were points _ou nos ames sont unies_. The
feudal dogmas of Boswell and his rigid adherence to his pet idea of 'the
grand scheme of subordination' were of course not likely to be pleasing
to the sceptical _aqua fortis_ of the sombre Genevese, with his belief
in the fraternity of mankind and the greatness of the untutored Indian.
Boswell crossed the Alps, and either then or upon his homeward journey
visited Bologna, Venice, and Mantua. He passed through Rome and, unknown
to either, may have met Gibbon in the Eternal City into whose mind, some
weeks before, 'as I sat musing among the ruins of the Capitol while the
bare-footed friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter,' had
started the idea of writing the _Decline and Fall_. In the city he met
Andrew Lumsden, the Secretary of Prince Charles Edward, but we are not
informed if the young Jacobite of five, who had prayed for the exiled
family now sought any opportunity of making himself known to the object
of his devotion. Naples brought him into the more congenial society of
Wilkes with whom, he says, he 'enjoyed many classical scenes with
peculiar relish.' When Churchill had died at Boulogne in the arms of
Wilkes, the latter had retired to Naples to inscribe his sorrow 'in the
close style of the ancients' upon an urn of alabaster which had been the
gift of Winckelmann, and in that city now he was, as the literary
executor, preparing annotations on the works of Churchill. Boswell
managed with his curious want of tact in such matters, fitting the man
who could suggest cards to a dying friend with an uneasy conscience, to
hint that the poet had 'bounced into the regions below,' and to render
the _Il Bruto Inglese_, by which the papers of the land referred to
Wilkes and liberty, by a version significant of the notorious ugliness
of his gay acquaintance. Naples, as with Milton, was the limit of his
tour, and from it he returned to Rome. He reached that city in April
1765, and dispatched a letter to Rousseau, then 'living in romantick
retirement' in Switzerland, requesting his promised introduction to the
Corsican general, 'which if he refused, I should certainly go without
it, and probably be hanged as a spy.' The wild philosopher was as good
as his word, and the letter met the traveller at Florence. 'The charms
of sweet Siena detained me no longer than they should have done, I
required the hardy air of Corsica to brace me, after the delights of
Tuscany,' an enigmatical turn of expression upon which light is thrown
later, when we discuss the love affairs of Boswell, by a reference to a
dark-eyed 'signora' on whom the tender traveller had glanced. At Leghorn
he was within one day's sail of Corsica.
Pascal Paoli was the Garibaldi of his day. When his father in 1738 had
been driven from the island by the French, he had retired with him to
Naples where he entered a military college and followed the profession
of arms. The way was paved for his return by the disturbances in the
island in 1755, and so successful was he in his guerilla warfare as
general against the Genoese, the owners of Corsica, that they were
speedily driven to sue for peace. It was in a sort of lull in the storm
of hostilities that our traveller made his unexpected appearance, and
the adroit way in which he managed to lay his plans of action and to
carry them out with such complete success calls for our admiration. In
his _Tour_ he simply says that 'having resolved to pass some years
abroad (this is excellent, after his letter to Sir Andrew) for my
instruction and entertainment, I conceived a design of visiting the
Island of Corsica. I wished for something more than just the common
course of what is called the tour of Europe, and Corsica occurred to me
as a place where nobody else had been.' It may have been suggested to
him by Rousseau, who had been engaged in some vague scheme of
philandering philanthropy by which the wild philosopher was to play the
Solon and the Lycurgus of the distressed islanders, and establish a
fresh code of laws upon the basis of his new fraternity, but with which
'this steady patriot of the world alone,' as Canning styles him, 'the
friend of every country but his own,' managed to mix in a much more
practical way some not very honourable, if characteristic, intrigues for
the surrender of the island to France.
Bozzy, at all events, was determined to make a bold bid for fame.
Nothing like this had occurred, as an opening, during all his tour. The
dangers of the plan were fully known to him, and the possibility was
laid before his eyes of capture at the hands of the Barbary corsairs and
a term of imprisonment at Algiers. Our adventurer waited on the
commodore in command of the British squadron in the bay of Leghorn, and
he was provided with a passport, the value of which against the
threatened dangers does not sufficiently appear. Before he left Leghorn,
his proposed visit had come to be regarded in a very serious light by
Italian politicians. They saw in him an envoy from the British intrusted
with powers to negotiate a treaty with Corsica, and all disclaimers of
any such intention were politely treated as an evasion. Bozzy was in
consequence viewed as 'a very close young man,' a trait that at no time
of his life was ever applicable to James Boswell, on whom, indeed, the
advice given by Sir Henry Wotton to Milton would have been thrown away.
Putting out to sea in a Tuscan vessel bound for Capo Corso for wine, he
had two days to spend on board in consequence of a dead calm. 'At
sunset,' he says, 'all the people in the ship sang _Ave Maria_ with
great devotion and some melody.' One recalls the similar circumstances
under which Cardinal Newman found himself becalmed on the orange-boat in
the Straits of Bonifacio. For some hours he had put himself in spirits
by taking a hand at the oar, and at seven in the evening of the second
day they landed in the harbour of Centuri. He delivered his credentials,
and on Sunday heard a Corsican sermon, where the preacher told of
Catharine of Siena who wished to be laid in the mouth of the awful pit,
that she might stop it up, and so prevent the falling in of more souls.
'I confess, my brethren,' cried the friar, 'I have not such zeal, but I
do what I can, I warn you how to avoid it.'
At Corte, the capital of the island, he waited boldly upon the Supreme
Council. He was gravely received, as befitted a supposed British envoy,
and lodged in the apartment of Paoli in a Franciscan convent. Next day,
the old petitioner for a commission in the Guards found the first and
last military experience of his life. Three French deserters waited on
him in the belief that he came to recruit soldiers for Scotland, and
'begged to have the honour of going along with me.' Nor was the idea so
absurd as he seems to have viewed it, for from the _Scots Magazine_ of a
somewhat later date we learn that British Volunteers and Highlanders
disbanded after the wars had been enlisted in the service of Paoli. But
it is not improbable that the deserters had heard of Boswell's
nationality from the woman of Penrith whom he found in the island,
married to a French soldier in the army of the Pretender, whose fortunes
she had followed when they had passed through Carlisle on the retreat
from Derby. Another feature of Boswell, one whose consideration and
explanation we shall attempt later on, now for the first time meets us,
his inveterate love for interviewing criminals, and accordingly, 'as I
wished to see all things in Corsica,' he had a meeting with the hangman
who seemed sensible of his situation. The inhabitants crowded round him
at a village as he advanced, and questioned the traveller, as Coleridge
at Valetta found himself similarly interrogated, as to his professing
himself a Christian when he did not believe in the Pope--_e perche_, and
why? The old candidate for the priesthood managed to deftly evade this
query by an assurance that in Britain the people were too far off and in
a theological climate of their own. He was in the highest humour, and in
this unusual flow of spirits he harangued the men of Bastelica with
great fluency, getting, however, at Sollacaro somewhat nervous as the
interview with the Corsican leader drew nigh. Paoli lived in constant
dread of assassination, and the sudden arrival of this mysterious
stranger was strongly calculated to arouse suspicions. For ten minutes,
in silence, he looked at Boswell, who broke in with the remark that he
was a gentleman from Scotland upon his travels and had lately visited
Rome from which, having seen the ruins of one brave people, he was now
come to view the rise of another. The general was not quite set at ease
by this sententiously balanced sentence, and years after he told Miss
Burney about his impressions at the time of the mysterious stranger. It
shews the ruling passion strong in life, and that Boswell, as 'the
chiel' amang them takin' notes,' forgot the rules of ordinary courtesy
and prudence in the gratification of his darling method. 'He came to my
country sudden,' said Paoli in his broken English, 'and he fetched me
some letters of recommending him. And I supposed, in my _mente_ he was
in the privacy one espy; for I look away from him to my other companies,
and when I look back to him I behold it in his hands his tablet, and one
pencil. O, he was at the work, I give it you my honour, of writing down
all what I say to some persons whatsoever in the room. I was angry
enough, pretty much so. But soon I found out I was myself the monster he
came to observe. O, he is a very good man Mr Boswell at the bottom, so
witty, cheerful, so talkable. But at the first, Oh I was indeed _fache_
of the sufficient.' This first glimpse of Bozzy at work is delightful.
He was in fact "making himself," all unknown the while, as Shortreed
said of Scott over the Liddesdale raids.
He dined with the general and suite. In spite of, perhaps by very reason
of, his protestations of having no diplomatic mission, the highest
attention was shewn him as an accredited envoy from St James'. In the
morning chocolate was served up to him on a silver salver with the
national arms; he rode out on the general's horse, with guards marching
before him. Paoli knew sufficient English to maintain the dialogue,
having picked up some slight knowledge of the tongue from Irish refugee
officers in the Neapolitan service. His library was turned over by his
inquisitive guest, who found among the books some odd volumes of _The
Spectator_ and _The Tatler_, Pope's _Essay on Man_, _Gulliver's
Travels_, and Barclay's _Apology for the Quakers_. His good humour, as
it had won on the general, endeared the supposed _ambasciadore Inglese_
to the peasants, and he had a Corsican dress made for him. Of that
dress--'in which I walked about with an air of true satisfaction'--every
one who has heard of James Boswell has read, and it is inseparable
somehow from our conceptions of the man and writer.
We select from this Corsican Tour--the least known to the general reader
of Boswell's three great works--what seems to us the gem of the
book:--'One day they must needs hear me play upon my German flute. To
have told my honest natural visitants, 'Really, gentlemen, I play very
ill,' and put on such airs as we do in our genteel companies, would have
been highly ridiculous. I therefore immediately complied with their
request. I gave them one or two Italian airs, and then some of our
beautiful old Scots tunes, _Gilderoy_, _The Lass o' Patie's Mill_, _Corn
Riggs are Bonny_.' The pathetick simplicity and pastoral gaiety of the
Scots musick will always please those who have the genuine feelings of
nature. The Corsicans were charmed with the specimens I gave them,
though I may now say that they were very indifferently performed. My
good friends insisted also to have an English song from me. I
endeavoured to please them in this, too. I sung them 'Hearts of Oak are
our Ships, Hearts of Oak are our Men.' I translated it into Italian for
them, and never did I see men so delighted as the Corsicans were.
'_Cuore di querco_,' cried they, '_bravo Inglese!_' It was quite a
joyous riot. I fancied myself to be a recruiting sea officer. I fancied
all my chorus of Corsicans aboard the British fleet.'
How admirable is the style of all this, equal quite to Goldsmith's best
and lightest touch! Exquisite, too, is that picture of Bozzy, as the
rollicking British stage-tar of tradition, in his rendering of Garrick's
song, the gems from the Opera and the national melodies. Allan Ramsay's
song in Corsica is to be equalled only by Goldsmith on _his_ tour when
he played, but not for amusement, _Barbara Allan_ and _Johnny
Armstrong's Good Night_ before the doors of Italian convents and Flemish
homesteads.
But the highstrung Bozzy had to experience a revulsion of low feelings
to which he was ever prone. He is soon in a sort of Byronic fit, and he
continues in a strain with which we should have not credited the 'gay
classic friend of Jack Wilkes' and of that Sienese _signora_, unless he
had turned evidence against himself. He declared his feelings to Paoli,
as he had done to Johnson, whose curt advice had been not to confuse or
resolve the common consequences of irregularity into an unalterable
decree of destiny. To the general he now attributed his feeling of the
vanity of life, the exhaustion in the very heat of youth of all the
sweets of being, and the incapacity for taking part in active life to
his 'metaphysical researches,' his reasoning beyond his depth on such
subjects as it is not given to man to know. These hesitances the other
wisely pushed aside with the soldierly advice to strengthen his mind by
the perusal of Livy and Plutarch. In return Bozzy gave an imitation of
'my revered friend Mr Samuel Johnson,' little dreaming that all three
would one day be intimate in London, and the general's house in Portman
Square be always at the traveller's disposal. From the palace, as he
styles it, of Paoli, Nov. 1765 he wrote to Johnson, as he had done
before, 'from a kind of superstition agreeable to him as to myself,'
from what he calls _loca solennia_--places of solemn interest. 'I dare
to call this a spirited tour. I dare to challenge your approbation;'
and, reading it twenty years later in the original which the old man
had preserved, he found it full of 'generous enthusiasm.' No account of
the continental travels of Boswell would be complete without the
reproduction of his letter to the doctor from Wittenberg. It is one of
the most important for the more subtle shades of psychology in the
writer's character.
'_Sunday, Sept. 30, 1764._
MY EVER DEAR AND MUCH RESPECTED SIR,--You know my solemn
enthusiasm of mind. You love me for it, and I respect myself
for it, because in so far I resemble Mr Johnson. You will be
agreeably surprized when you learn the reason of my writing
this letter. I am at Wittenberg in Saxony. I am in the old
church where the Reformation was first preached, and where some
of the Reformers lie interred. I cannot resist the serious
pleasure of writing to Mr Johnson from the tomb of Melancthon.
My paper rests upon the gravestone of that great and good man
who was undoubtedly the best of all the Reformers.... At this
tomb, then, my ever dear and respected friend! I vow to thee an
eternal attachment. It shall be my study to do what I can to
render your life happy: and if you die before me, I shall
endeavour to do honour to your memory and, elevated by the
remembrance of you, persist in noble piety. May God, the father
of all beings, ever bless you! and may you continue to love
your most affectionate friend, and devoted servant,--JAMES BOSWELL.'
So early had Boswell made his resolve to be the biographer of Johnson.
On the very day of his introduction to him, he had taken notes of all
that had passed in Davies' back-parlour. He was none of the men that do
things by halves, and blunder into a kind of success, as some of his
depreciators have thought.
Six weeks he had been in Corsica. The first day of December saw him land
at Genoa on his return, Lyons was reached on the third day of the new
year, Paris one week later. Here Rousseau who had preceded him to London
had provided him with a curious commission, the bringing over into
England of his mistress Therese Levasseur. The easy-going Hume thus
announces the fact to his friend the Countess de Boufflers.
'Mademoiselle sets out with a friend of mine, a young gentleman, very
good humoured, very agreeable, and very mad. He has such a rage for
literature that I dread some event fatal to my friend's honour. For
remember the story of Terentia who was first married to Cicero, then to
Sallust, and at last in her old age married a young nobleman, who
imagined that she must possess some secret which would convey to him
eloquence and genius.' A letter he found waiting from Johnson, together
with one announcing the death of his mother. No more was heard about a
second year at Utrecht. He crossed to London, and was again with his old
friend, who had moved from the Temple to a good house in Johnson's
Court, in Fleet Street. Goldsmith was no longer the obscure writer whom
he had left behind, but the author of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ and the
_Traveller_. The club had been founded. He was encouraged by the sage to
publish his account of his travels in Corsica--'you cannot go to the
bottom, but all that you tell us will be new.'
He dined at the Mitre as of old, and presented Temple to Johnson. No
word about his companion across the Channel, naturally enough, reached
the old man's ears, but he mentioned Rousseau; though he recognised he
was now in a new moral atmosphere where every attempt was resented to
'unhinge or weaken good principles.' On a modified defence of the
philosopher, whose works he professed had afforded him edification, he
did venture, but thinking it enough to defend one at a time Boswell said
nothing 'of my gay friend Wilkes.' In the Paris _salons_ of that winter
Wilkes, Sterne, Foote, Hume, and Rousseau, had been the received lions.
Hume had taken up the wild philosopher whose melodramatic Armenian dress
had been the attraction at the houses of the leaders of society, the
ladies who (says Horace Walpole who was there this year) 'violated all
the duties of life and gave very pretty suppers.' It was the day of
Anglomania on the Continent, when the name of Chatham was a name to
conjure with, and Hume was expounding deism to the great ladies,--'when
the footmen were in the room,' adds the shocked Horace,--lionizing Hume
'who is the only thing they believe in implicitly; which they must do,
for I defy them to understand any language that he speaks,' in allusion
to the broad Scottish accent of the philosopher.
The fantastic attire of Rousseau may have suggested to Bozzy the
Corsican dress in his valise, or he may have construed into a command,
willingly enough, the hint Paoli had dropped to let them know at home
how affairs were going. He waited on Chatham with it, and was received
pompously but graciously, says the Earl of Buchan who was present, for a
touch of melodrama was not uncongenial to the great minister, the
'Pericles of Great Britain,' as the general had styled him. Bozzy
thanked him 'for the very genteel manner in which you are pleased to
treat me.' In return, Chatham eulogized Paoli as one of Plutarch's men,
as Cardinal de Retz had said of Montrose.
He saw Auchinleck in somewhat altered circumstances from those in which,
four years before, he had left his father's house, riding through
Glasgow 'in a cocked hat, a brown wig, brown coat made in the court
fashion, red vest, corduroy small clothes, and long military-looking
boots, with his servant riding a most aristocratic distance behind.' He
had left it likely to vex the soul of his father, the laureate of
doggerel, threatening to be the disgrace of the family; he returned as
the acquaintance, in varying degrees of intimacy, of Johnson, Wilkes,
Churchill, Goldsmith, the Earl Marischal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Paoli,
Chatham, and plenipotentiaries of all kinds. A wonderful list for the
raw youth they had known at home; yet nowhere in all his intercourse
does he show the least want of self-possession or easy bearing. The
'facility of manners' and his good humour had carried him all through
his curious experiences with German courts and Italian peasants. A
'spirited tour,' truly, if perhaps the moral results had been greater.
The nobility and gentry of this country were welcomed abroad with but
too great avidity. Italy, the garden of Europe, Bozzy declared to be the
Covent Garden, and isolated passages in his book shew that he could not
claim, like Milton, to have borne himself truly 'in all these places
where so many things are considered lawful.' Fox, we know, did not
escape the contagion of the grand tour, and Boswell had been 'caught
young.'
Nor will the reader find much fault in what the adverse critics have
unduly emphasized--his interviewing or forcing himself upon men. A man,
as Johnson said to him when seeking an interlocutor on this point,
always makes himself greater as he increases his knowledge. When he was
at Dunvegan on his northern tour, and Colonel Macleod seemed to hint at
this, Bozzy offers as his defence of what 'has procured me much
happiness' the eagerness he ever felt to share the society of men
distinguished by their rank or talents. If a man, he adds, is praised
for seeking knowledge, though mountains and seas are in his way, he may
be pardoned in the pursuit of the same object under difficulties as
great though of a different kind. And the defence will not be refused
him for the use he has made of the means. Wisdom and literature alike
are justified of their children, and the masters in either are not so
numerous that we can afford to quarrel with them, or wrangle over their
respective merits. 'Sensation,' said Johnson, '_is_ sensation,' and the
pretty general feeling now is that in his department Boswell is a
master.
From his first setting out, he had written down every night what he had
noted during the day, 'throwing together that I might afterwards make a
selection at leisure.' He was to try his 'prentice hand on his _Tour in
Corsica_ before shewing his strength in his two greater works. Mrs
Barbauld regarded him as no ordinary traveller, with
'Working thoughts which swelled the breast
Of generous Boswell, when with noble aim
And views beyond the narrow beaten track
By trivial fancy trod, he turned his course
From polished Gallia's soft delicious vales.'
Such thoughts were perhaps really foreign to that traveller, yet Dr Hill
assures us that by every Corsican of education the name of Boswell is
known and honoured. One curious circumstance is given. At Pino, when
Boswell fancying himself 'in a publick house' or inn, had called for
things, the hostess had said _una cosa dopo un altra, signore_, 'one
thing after another, sir.' This has lingered as a memento of Bozzy in
Corsica, and has been found by Dr Hill to be preserved among the
traditions in the Tomasi family. Translations of the book in Italian,
Dutch, French, and German, spread abroad the name of the traveller who,
if like a prophet without honour in his own country, has not been
without it elsewhere.