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Updated: May 10, 2025
It may not be quite impossible that, mingling with the brilliant essayist's ill-will to the politics of the travellers, there was an unconscious strain of resentment at the contemptuous way in which his relations had been tossed by the doctor, and that Bozzy's own subsequent denunciations of the abolitionists and the slave trade had edged the memories in the mind of the son of Zachary Macaulay.
What it must have been a few years before my time may be judged of from Bozzy's 'Letter to Lord Braxfield, published in 1780. He thinks that, besides a carriage and his own carriage-horses, every judge ought to have his sumpter-horse, and ought not to travel faster than the waggon which carried the baggage of the circuit.
Augustine was heavily handicapped by being a saint. Samuel Pepys was no saint. We might best define him, perhaps, by saying that if ever any man was his own Boswell, that man was Samuel Pepys. He had Bozzy's delightful appreciation of life; writing in cypher, he had Bozzy's shamelessness and more, and he was his own hero.
Next day being Sunday Bozzy's spirits were cheered by the climate and the weather, but 'had I not had Dr Johnson to contemplate, I should have been sunk into dejection, but his firmness supported me. I looked at him as a man whose head is turning giddy at sea looks at a rock. Everywhere they met signs of the parting of the ways in the Highlands.
His father, too, was now about to entail his estate, and Bozzy's predilection for feudal principles and heirs male brought things to a deadlock. He appealed to Lord Hailes, who admitted conscience and self formed a strong plea when found on different sides.
From Moss Giel we drove through a variety of pleasant scenes, some of which were familiar to us by their connection with Burns. Our driver spoke of Sir James as a kind, free-hearted man, but addicted to horse-races and similar pastimes, and a little too familiar with the wine-cup; so that poor Bozzy's booziness would appear to have become hereditary in his ancient line.
Birkbeck Hill's edition of Bozzy's "Life of Dr. Johnson." But Mrs. Radcliffe has been read diligently, and copiously annotated. This lady was, in a literary sense, and though, like the sire of Evelina, he cast her off, the daughter of Horace Walpole. Just when King Romance seemed as dead as Queen Anne, Walpole produced that Gothic tale, "The Castle of Otranto," in 1764.
Johnson tried to pole the large dead cat over Dr. Taylor's dam, an incident that Boswell recorded as part of his "Flemish picture of my friend." It was then also that Mrs. Killingley, mistress of Ashbourne's leading inn, The Green Man, begged Boswell "to name the house to his extensive acquaintance." Certainly Bozzy's acquaintance was to be far more extensive than good Mrs.
All this is amusing in the same way as it was amusing to Boz, as a capital illustration of character, genuinely exhibited, and yet it is with the greatest sympathy and affection I recall these things: but they were too enjoyable. There is nothing depreciating, no more than there was in Bozzy's record, who so amiably puts forward the pleasant weaknesses of his hero.
The accuracy of his description, his eye for scenes and dramatic effects, have all been fully borne witness to by those who have followed in their track, and the fact of the book being day by day read by Johnson, during its preparation, gives it an additional value from the perfect veracity of its contents 'as I have resolved that the very journal which Dr Johnson read shall be presented to the publick, I will not expand the text in any considerable degree. If the way in which the Rambler roughed it, 'laughing to think of myself roving among the Hebrides at sixty, and wondering where I shall rove at four score, is admirable, none the less so is Bozzy's imperturbable good humour.
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