without the sage advice and severe repression of his mentor. He was a frank egotist, and his letters are concerned for the most part with himself, his fortunes, and his feelings. In those which he wrote to Temple we see him as he appeared to himself in the candid presentation of everything he did or thought; in his letters to others we see him as he wished to appear to them.

No biography of Boswell was written for nearly a hundred years after his death, and now, some thirty years later, we have the first collection of his letters, which tell us much that is new, and in their combination give the best material for studying his life and character. We have not, as we have in the case of most men whose letters are published, letters to his family. Boswell's family had small regard for his writings, and as they destroyed his journals and much else that he left at his death, so they had no desire to preserve his correspondence. It is for this reason that very few letters to his relatives are extant, and none to his father or his wife. The survival of the letters to Temple, which outweigh the rest of the letters in importance, is a fortunate accident. They were discovered about the middle of the last century in a shop at Boulogne, having been sold as wrapping-paper by a hawker. Probably more had already been used and destroyed than were left to be

published. Boswell wrote regularly and frequently to Temple throughout his life; but while in some years there are as many as eighteen letters, in others in which we know the correspondence was kept up none have survived. The record is unequal; we have full evidence for some years, and little or none of any value in others.

Of Boswell's boyhood nothing memorable is recorded. At an early age he matriculated at the University of Edinburgh, and there, though his chief study was the law, he was enrolled in the Humanity class and the Greek class. "I would fain recover Greek," he wrote in 1780, “or, indeed, learn it, for I never had much." He could quote Latin pat to the occasion, but, with a certain economy, his quotations were drawn mainly from Virgil and Horace. He educated himself, in the sense that every man's education is a matter of his own choice and his own achievement, excellently well. He read at intervals much literature, and for the most part knew what was best. He learnt " the English pronunciation" from Mr Love, and on his tour to the Continent acquired a good knowledge of French and Italian. Lastly, he trained himself to write in an admirably clear style, in which the words are fitly chosen to express the meaning.

His most intimate friend at Edinburgh was Temple. They were both pupils of Professor

other; they discussed their youthful ambitions, and pictured each other as "the great man in the horizon of the future. They parted in 1758, Temple to pursue his education at Cambridge, Boswell to continue in Edinburgh. Temple probably intended to make law his profession, for he entered Trinity Hall, the college of lawyers, and after an interval in his residence he graduated in 1765 as a Bachelor of Laws. Norton Nicholls, the friend of Gray, was his contemporary at Trinity Hall, and probably through his introduction Temple came to know the poet. Soon after taking his degree, Temple, whose means had been reduced by helping a bankrupt father and an improvident brother, took holy orders, and held livings at first in Devonshire and later in Cornwall until the end of his life. In 1767 he married a lady of genteel fortune, but his relations with his wife (who had no liking for Boswell) were not altogether happy, and we learn from the correspondence of Gray and Norton Nicholls that there was at one time a talk of a separation. It is difficult to judge of the character of a man whom we know for the most part from letters written to him and the allusions contained therein. Boswell calls him a sober grave man, and writes

a fat man, with a large white wig, were quite charmed with

neat black periwig and his polite address." The description of his being able to sit quite serene, placid, and happy in a company, where, perhaps, he hardly opened his mouth, suggests an easy and contented mind; but we have other testimony that he was "reserved, highly strung, subject to fits of depression.” And we know from Boswell's letters that he was often unsettled and restless for change, and even had thoughts of changing his profession. He differed from his friend in being a Whig and a water-drinker. Boswell credits him with a domestic disposition, a love of books and of rural scenes.

As Boswell and Temple when together enjoyed "invaluable hours of elegant friendship and classical sociality," so much of their correspondence was concerned with books and their writers. The character of Gray, of which Boswell arranged the publication in the

London Magazine,' and which both Mason and Johnson quoted in their lives of the poet, was written in a letter to Boswell soon after Gray's death. A year after it had been printed in Mason's 'Memoirs' of Gray, Temple projected the publication of Remarks on various Authours in a series of letters to James Boswell, Esq.,' which was to be based, it seems, on

letters actually sent to Boswell. The book never saw the light. As Boswell kept Temple's letters, which he wished him to publish, so, at an earlier date, he suggested that Temple should take care of the letters he received. "Remember to put my letters in a book neatly; see which of us does it first." Temple faithfully obeyed, and it is to his loyalty that we owe the long series of Boswell's letters, which begins in 1758, and continues to the last weeks of Boswell's life.

The letters to Temple are unique in literature. No other letters have ever given so frank a revelation of their writer's mind and feelings. Perhaps the nearest parallel to them is a work like Pepys' Diary, written for the author's own gratification. Boswell happily describes his letters as written conversation. As he and Temple had been friends in the expansive age of student life, and shared their inmost thoughts with one another, so Boswell needed a friend to whom he could impart without reserve every passing feeling, to whom he could look for sympathy in his weakness and distress, who would help him with understanding and advice. His first letters, written in the year 1758, before and after his eighteenth birthday, are somewhat stilted and priggish in tone, as when, in alluding to Temple's "uneasiness to be amongst so profligate a set at Cambridge," he writes: "I hope (by divine assistance) VOL. CCXVII.-NO. MCCCXII.

Heaven knows that sordid motive is farthest from my thoughts." His second letter encloses a few poetical trifles of his own which had appeared in the magazines. So he had begun to write and to print.

For more than two years there are no letters surviving, and the loss is to be regretted, for it was an interesting period in his life. In November 1759 he matriculated at Glasgow, and studied moral philosophy under Adam Smith. Many years later Boswell relates that "Smith is now of our Club.

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