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which is given to very few learned men. There it appears that he was a man who spoke off-hand a thousand good things. His memory extended to what was ancient and modern; to the court and to the city; to the dead and to the living languages; to things serious and things jocose; in a word, to a thousand sorts of subjects. That which appeared a trifle to some readers of the Menagiana, who did not consider circumstances, caused admiration in other readers, who minded the difference between what a man speaks without preparation, and that which he prepares for the press. And, therefore, we cannot sufficiently commend the care which his illustrious friends took to erect a monument so capable of giving him immortal glory. They were not obliged to rectify what they had heard him say; for, in so doing, they had not been faithful historians of his conversations.’

NOTES

1. Boswell’s London Journal, 1762–1763, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950, and London: Heinemann, 1951), pp. 43-4; 19 November 1762.

2. Joseph Addison, Cato (1713), V.i.1-9, p. 56.

3. London Journal, pp. 45-6.

4. Ibid., pp. 49–50.

5. Ibid., p. 139.

6. ‘I should live no more than I can record, as one should not have more corn growing than one can get in’ (journal entry for 17 March 1776: Boswell: The Ominous Years, 1774–76, ed. Charles Ryskamp and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), p. 265). Boswell slightly reworked this phrasing in his article on diaries in the London Magazine for March 1783: ‘Sometimes it has occurred to me that a man should not live more than he can record, as a farmer should not have a larger crop than he can gather in’ (Margery Bailey, ed., Boswell’s Column (London: William Kimber, 1951), p. 332).

7. London Journal, p. 149. Although it is run close by the scene (pp. 142-3) Boswell gives of a salacious conversation between himself, in the rakish character of ‘a valiant man who could gratify a lady’s loving desires five times in a night’, and a lady of fashion whom he calls ‘Lady Mirabel’. The name is an allusion to William Congreve’s The Way of the World (1700), where however it is the male lead who is called Mirabell. The reversal of names is typically Boswellian, in its revealing carelessness. Cf. also Boswell’s imagining himself as Macheath from The Beggar’s Opera (1728) when in a tavern with two whores: pp. 263-4.

8. Ibid., p. 260.

9. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 207-8.

10. For Boswell’s occasional backsliding and fitful commitment, from the consequences of which he was largely rescued by the assistance of Edmond Malone (who acted, in the words of Peter Martin, as ‘midwife’ to the Life of Johnson), see Peter Martin, Edmond Malone, Shakespearean Scholar: A Literary Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 144 – 64; Paul Korshin, ‘Johnson’s Conversation’, in Greg Clingham, ed., New Light on Boswell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 186; and Bruce Redford, Designing the Life of Johnson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 24-6. Direct evidence of Malone’s vital assistance can be found in Marshall Waingrow, ed., The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson, 2nd edn, corrected and enlarged (Edinburgh, New Haven and London: Edinburgh University Press and Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 227, 256, 258, 294 and 462.

11. Sir John Hawkins, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1787); Hester Lynch Thrale, later Piozzi, Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786); Isaac Reed and/or George Steevens, An Account of the Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson, Including Some Incidents of his Life (1784-5); Thomas Tyers, A Biographical Sketch of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1785); William Cooke, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1785); William Shaw, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late Dr. Samuel Johnson (1785); Joseph Towers, An Essay on the Life, Character, and Writings of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1786); James Harrison, The Life of Dr. Samuel Johnson (1786).

12. On the broader significance of the introduction of this pictorial