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The awful disputant of the club-room, solemn, ponderous, severe and merciless, the admiration and the terror of humble Bozzy, the stern monitor of gentle Oliver, the friend of Garrick and Reynolds to-night; and before to-morrow sunset a weak, miserable old man, discovered by good Mr. and Mrs.
How the babbling Bozzy, inspired only by Love, and the recognition and vision which love can lend, epitomizes nightly the words of Wisdom, the deeds and aspects of Wisdom, and so, by little and little, unconsciously works together for us a whole Johnsoniad; a more free, perfect, sunlit, and spirit-speaking likeness, than for many centuries had been drawn by man of man!
Here again we have that old saying verified, "The heart sees farther than the head." Thus does poor Bozzy stand out to us as an ill-assorted, glaring mixture of the highest and the lowest. What, indeed is man's life generally but a kind of beast-godhead; the god in us triumphing more and more over the beast; striving more and more to subdue it under his feet?
'You are a promising lad, he told him next morning, 'and if you go on as you have begun, you may be a Bozzy yourself yet. No wonder that we find him hesitating about going on the spring northern circuit, which would cost him, he says, fifty pounds, and oblige him to be in rough company for four weeks. His only piece of promotion came from Lord Lonsdale.
It would almost appear as if Bozzy had read himself into Butler's doctrine that our present life is a state of probation for a future one, but had forgotten the qualification 'that our future interest is now depending on ourselves. The very influence of Johnson himself may have affected the weaker mind of Boswell injuriously.
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.
'Now, my dear Bozzy, let us have done with quarrels and with censure. Let me know whether I have not sent you a pretty library. There are, perhaps, many books among them which you never need read through; but there are none which it is not proper for you to know, and sometimes to consult.
Johnson was in Oxford at the time, and thither flew Bozzy to obtain the approval of his labours and, with an eye to all future contingencies, his sanction for the publication in his biography of all Johnson's letters to him. 'When I am dead, sir, was the reply, 'you may do as you will. 'My book, he writes eagerly to Temple, 'has amazing celebrity.
Burke says, that you have so much good humour naturally, it is scarce a virtue. The faithful Bozzy replied, 'They were afraid of you, sir, as it was you who proposed me; and the doctor was prone to admit that if the one blackball necessary to exclude had been given, they knew they never would have got in another member. Yet even from this rebuff he managed to deftly extract a compliment.
Johnson, who much preferred the author of "Pamela" to the author of "Tom Jones" and said so in the hammer-and-tongs style for which he is famous, declared to Bozzy that "there is all the difference in the world between characters of nature and characters of manners: and there is the difference between the characters of Fielding and those of Richardson.
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