James Boswell

Notwithstanding what some detractors have said of Mr. Pope's petty jealousy, he gave the verses of his new rival no small praise, and having learnt through Mr. Richardson who the poet was, told me that Mr. Johnson would soon be deterred.

I had no personal acquaintance with the doctor till seventeen sixty-three when I was presented to him at the Mitre Tavern by Mr. James Boswell, a young Scotchman of excellent family and great learning, but small wit, whose metrical effusions I had sometimes revised.

Dr. Johnson, as I beheld him, was a full, pursy man, very ill-dressed and of slovenly aspect.

I recall him to have worn a bushy bob wig, untied and without powder and much too small for his head.

Later, he insulted Mr. Burke in so intolerable a manner that we all took pains to show our disapproval.

After which incident, he came no more to our meetings.

However, he never openly fell out with the doctor and was the executor of his will, though Mr. Boswell and others have reason to question the genuineness of his attachment.

Other and later members of the club were Mr. David Garrick, the actor and early friend of Dr. Johnson; Messrs. Thomas and Joseph Warton; Dr. Adam Smith; Dr. Percy, author of The Reliquis; Mr. Edward Gibbon, the historian; Dr. Burney, the musician; Mr. Malone, the critic; and Mr. Boswell.

But there's no evidence that he visited the place because...

And contemporaneously, James Boswell wrote a biography of Dr. Johnson, and he didn't write about Johnson ever frequenting the place.

Yet there are it's just commonly accepted that he he went there.

He was a barfly.

The case makes its way all the way up through the appeals process to the highest court in Scotland, where Lord Kames himself is sitting on the bench.

And the legal arguments presented on Joseph Knight's behalf, which, fascinatingly, were partially advised by figures like James Boswell and the English writer Samuel Johnson, leaned heavily on the philosophical groundwork laid over the past few decades.

Oh, that's interesting.

They argued from Hutchison's perspective that no human being is by nature the property of another.

I didn't see it as charming.

No, Broad Scots was viewed by the English metropolitan elite not as a charming regional variation, but as a corrupt, barbaric, and uneducated dialect.

We see this prejudice so clearly in the life of James Boswell, the famous biographer.

He travels to London in the 1760s, absolutely desperate to be accepted as part of the cosmopolitan literary elite.

He or she may be disappointed, for there is no plot to speak of.

But there is talk, about as good talk as has ever been reported, and James Boswell as a reporter has never had an equal.

My own part in the work is very attenuated, as attenuated as a piece of thread.

It has to be, for on this slender thread of my own manufacture I have elected to string jewels, exquisite in cut and color.

The jewels are, most of them, genuine.

A few are teclas.

And ardent Johnsonians and Boswellians, too, may amuse themselves in sorting them out if they care to.

I permit myself to remark that several experts have been deceived.

It's like we haven't had a drink.

And as we're walking down, Sophie, to segue us into the Enlightenment, I want to talk briefly about the famous trip, and this is what I referred to at the start, that Samuel Johnson, the great 18th century English literary figure and lexicographer who wrote the first dictionary, made to Scotland in 1773 on the behest of... of his friend James Boswell, who we've done an episode about, of course.

Yes.

Samuel Johnson was famous for his contempt for Scotland and the Scottish.

Yes.

Rather official.

James Boswell is always much more anecdotal and conversational.

And he talks about bringing Johnson into Edinburgh for the very first time on that very first night.

End of chapter 9 Chapter 10 of Companionable Books by Henry Van Dyke This LibriVox recording is in the public domain.

Chapter 10 Samuel Johnson, a sturdy believer When James Boswell, Esquire, wrote The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D., he not only achieved his purpose of giving the world a rich intellectual treasure, but also succeeded in making himself a subject of permanent literary interest.

Among the good things which the year 1922 has brought to us, I count the Boswell Redivivus from the industrious and skillful hand of Professor Chauncey Brewster Tinker of Yale.

He calls his excellent book, which is largely enriched with new material in the way of hitherto unpublished letters, Young Boswell.

This does not mean that he deals only with the early years, amatory episodes, and first literary ventures of Johnson's inimitable biographer, but that he sees in the man a certain persistent youngness which accounts for the exuberance of his faults and follies as well as for the enthusiasm of his hero worship.

Mr. Tinker does not attempt to camouflage the incorrigible absurdities of Boswell's disposition, nor the excesses of his conduct, but finds an explanation if not an excuse for them in the fact that he had a juvenile temperament which inclined him all through life to self-esteem and self-indulgence, and kept him very much a boy until he died of it.

Whether this is quite consistent with his being in fullest truth a genius, as Mr. Tinker claims, may be doubted, for genius in the high sense is something that ripens if time be given it.

But what is certain beyond a question is that this vain and vagarious little Scotch laird had in him a gift of observation, a talent of narration, and above all a power of generous admiration, which enabled him to become, by dint of hard work, what Macaulay entitled him the first of biographers.

Here Hume, one in town, spent tranquil days, and amidst the whirl and gaiety of Paris sighed, he tells us, twice or thrice a day for the armchair and the retreat it afforded him.

It is a curious fact that the house was for a time rented from Hume by James Boswell, who there received Dr. Samuel Johnson, whose antipathy to its owner was so extreme.

And during Hume's absence in France, it was occupied by Dr. Blair.

Grainger knows when you're a procurement manager for an office park, you're not managing one building, you're managing all of them.

He or she may be disappointed, for there is no plot to speak of.

But there is talk, about as good talk as has ever been reported, and James Boswell as a reporter has never had an equal.

My own part in the work is very attenuated, as attenuated as a piece of thread.

It has to be, for on this slender thread of my own manufacture, I have elected to string jewels, exquisite in cut and color.

The jewels are, most of them, genuine.

A few are teclas.

And ardent Johnsonians and Boswellians, too, may amuse themselves in sorting them out if they care to.

I permit myself to remark that several experts have been deceived.

Advertisement.

In presenting this version of the Psalms by Sir Philip Sidney and his sister the Countess of Pembroke to the notice of the literary world, it is necessary to state that it was undertaken at the suggestion of James Boswell, Esquire, who proposed writing an introduction in which the different versions were intended to have been compared.

His lamented death shortly after the work had gone to press caused this design to be reluctantly given up.

The manuscript from which it has been printed is in folio, copied from the original by John Davies of Hereford, writing master to Prince Henry, himself a poet of no mean attainment, and a contemporary of Sir Philip Sidney.

He or she may be disappointed, for there is no plot to speak of.

But there is talk, about as good talk as has ever been reported, and James Boswell as a reporter has never had an equal.

My own part in the work is very attenuated, as attenuated as a piece of thread.

It has to be, for on this slender thread of my own manufacture, I have elected to string jewels, exquisite in cut and color.

The jewels are, most of them, genuine.

A few are Teclas.

And ardent Johnsonians and Boswellians, too, may amuse themselves in sorting them out if they care to.

I permit myself to remark that several experts have been deceived.