The Life of Samuel Johnson - James Boswell [901]
13. Life of Johnson, below, p. 212.
14. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 117.
15. For a more typical expression of Boswell’s character, see the exchange of letters between Malone and Boswell over Boswell’s addition of the final four, self-praising, paragraphs to the ‘Advertisement’ to the second edition (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., pp. 408-9).
16. Redford, Designing the Life.
17. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 326.
18. Hamlet, I.ii.140. In Greek mythology Hyperion was either the father of the sun or the sun itself. He was dethroned by Apollo.
19. For Boswell’s pre-1763 publications, see George Watson, ed., The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Vol. 2:1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 1211.
20. For the sense of moral crisis in mid-century, see particularly John Brown’s celebrated An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757), a publishing phenomenon which went through seven editions in two years, and also John Leland’s A View of the Principal Deistical Writers, 3 vols. (1754-6).
21. Life of Johnson, below, p. 135. Compare Boswell’s delightfully un-self-aware comments on Johnson’s early friendship with Savage, ‘a man, of whom it is difficult to speak impartially, without wondering that he was for some time the intimate companion of Johnson; for his character was marked by profligacy, insolence, and ingratitude’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 93).
22. Ibid., p. 918.
23. Michel de Montaigne, ‘De l’amitie’ (‘On affectionate relationships’), Essais, i.28, in (Euvres completes, eds. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat, ‘Bibliotheque de la Pleiade’ (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), pp. 181–93; The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1987), pp. 205–19.
24. Life of Johnson, below, p. 247.
25. In respect of Johnson, consider Boswell’s concluding estimate of him: ‘He was afflicted with a bodily disease, which made him often restless and fretful; and with a constitutional melancholy, the clouds of which darkened the brightness of his fancy, and gave a gloomy cast to his whole course of thinking’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 1004). Boswell himself of course was, in the words of David Daiches, ‘subject to periodic bouts of disabling melancholy’ (Clingham, ed., New Light on Boswell, p. 6). The correspondence which survives from the period of composition of the Life frequently alludes to Boswell’s labouring under ‘a sad mental cloud’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 256: cf. also pp. 216 and 219).
26. Boswell in Holland, 1763–1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw Hill, and London: Heinemann, 1952), pp. 140 and 196.
27. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 368.
28. Essays collected as Boswell’s Column, ed. Margery Bailey (London: William Kimber, 1951). Quotations on pp. 23 and 25, from ‘On Periodical Papers’, London Magazine, 1 November 1777.
29. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., pp. 77 and 28. The reference is to Plutarch’s Moralia.
30. Ibid., p. 196.
31. Ibid., p. 136.
32. Rambler, 24 (1750); Life of Johnson, below, p. 84 – cf. also Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 97.
33. Life of Johnson, below, p. 500.
34. Although note the conclusion of the letter Johnson wrote Boswell on 27 August 1775, with its touching quotation from Hamlet, III.ii. 73 (Life of Johnson, below, p. 465).
35. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., pp. 35 and 55.
36. In July 1773, when Johnson had already known Boswell for over ten years; Piozzi, Anecdotes, pp. 31-2.
37. Tibullus, I.i.60; cf. Adventurer 58 (1753), where Johnson discusses the graceful reworking of this line by Ovid in his elegy on the death of Tibullus. For Johnson, this line of Tibullus was not just about companionship; as a site of repeated allusion, both by Johnson and by others, it itself nurtured and enacted a form of companionship. Life of Johnson, below, p. 992.
38. Ibid, p. 768, and Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 280.
39. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 552–61. See Sven Molin, ‘Boswell’s Account of the Johnson-Wilkes