brisk correspondence during the year. Their topics, as usual, literary and antiquarian—old poets, plays, interludes, epitaphs, sonnets, Venus and Adonis, Marlowe, Milton, Lord Southampton, and Shakspeare. How warmly to such things yearns the heart of an intelligent antiquary!
In this year likewise (1785) he had the pleasure of making a new acquaintance,—very soon transformed into a friend. This was Boswell; and the place of meeting no less appropriate—Baldwin’s printing-office while examining a proof-sheet of the Tour to the Hebrides. An intimacy ensued, which like most of the critic’s friendships continued undisturbed through life, though faults and follies scarcely attempted to be concealed impaired respect for his new companion. To many the now renowned biographer appeared then a jumble of contradictions—sense and nonsense, shrewdness and good humour, cunning and simplicity, vanity, yet with kindness and generosity; a tone of flattery to the great in order to make way in the world, combined with feelings of rectitude and firm regard to truth in biographical statements. Few gave him credit during life for the talents he really possessed. He puzzled even Dr. Johnson, who while in Scotland wrote of his companion “that he possessed better faculties than I had imagined.”
The devotion shown to the great moralist has perhaps tended to diminish the respect due to the writer of his life. He made him almost too sincerely the hero of worship; never for a moment swerved from his allegiance; sought him at all hours; evinced reverence in every way; and submitted patiently to reproofs which
