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Updated: June 29, 2025
If that divine guest does not occupy part of the space, vain intruders will, the fine old roll of Micawber to the close. Johnson on the 5th August started with him for Harwich in the stage coach, half in hopes of visiting Holland in the summer, and accompanying Bozzy in a tour through the Netherlands. 'I must see thee out of England, said the old man kindly.
Bozzy was a convivial knight-errant in what was called 'Saving the ladies. At clubs and gatherings any member would toast his idol in a bumper, and then another champion would enter his peerless Dulcinea in two bumpers, to be routed by the original toper taking off four.
If he could not do so by reason, he simply roared his opponent down and silenced him by sheer rudeness. "There is no arguing with Johnson," said one of his friends, Oliver Goldsmith, "for when his pistol misses fire he knocks you down with the butt end of it." And perhaps Goldy, as Johnson called him, had to suffer more rudeness from him than any of his friends to save Bozzy.
"My dear Boswell, I love you very much"; "My dear Boswell, your kindness is one of the pleasures of my life"; "Come to me, my dear Bozzy, and let us be as happy as we can." This is the way Johnson constantly wrote and spoke to him.
The very look of Boswell seems to have signified so much. The under part of Boswell's face is of a low, almost brutish character.... And now behold the worthy Bozzy, so pre-possessed and held back by nature and by art, fly nevertheless like iron to its magnet, whither his better genius called!
Were we so framed that it were possible by perpetual supplies of wine to keep ourselves for ever gay and happy, there could be no doubt that drinking would be the summum bonum, the chief good to find out which philosophers have been so variously busied. It looks as if poor Bozzy, when he wrote this, had heard of the Brunonian system of medicine, and of the unfortunate exemplication of it in practice and in precept by its founder in Edinburgh.
No reply was sent to this, but the judge, thinking that discretion was the wiser part in circumstances where it was useless to dictate without the means to enforce compliance, yielded reluctant consent to the scheme of an Italian tour. Gravely then does Bozzy rebuke Sir Andrew and for this occasion he forgives him, 'for I just say the same to young people when I advise.
He riddled the new devotion to physical science in the unlucky person of Sir Joseph Banks; the chief of his literary lampoons, a thing which is quite a masterpiece in its way, is his "Bozzy and Piozzi," wherein Boswell and Mrs.
Robinson the lovely "Perdita," whose portrait now hangs in the Wallace Collection. The Duchess of Devonshire and her sister, Lady Duncannon, are well in the centre of the picture; Captain Topham takes in the gay scene through his glass; Doctor Johnson, in a supper box, seems deeply engaged upon his meal, though Mrs. Thrale is on his right and "Bozzy" and Goldsmith are of the party.
There is in it a kind of architectural nobleness; it stands there like a great solid square-built edifice, finished, symmetrically complete: you judge that a true Builder did it. One word, in spite of our haste, must be granted to poor Bozzy. He passes for a mean, inflated, gluttonous creature; and was so in many senses. Yet the fact of his reverence for Johnson will ever remain noteworthy.
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