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Tour to the Hebrides, ed. F. A. Pottle and C. H. Bennett (London: William Heinemann, 1936), p. 300. The Life of Johnson was not Boswell’s sole biographical project even after 1773. In 1778 he expressed to Lord Kames his ‘determination’ to write Kames’s life, and to assume the literary character of Plutarch (The Private Papers of James Boswell from Malahide Castle, ed. Geoffrey Scott et al., 18 vols. (Mount Vernon, NY: W. E. Rudge, 1928–34), XV, 267). Biography was to some extent therapy for Boswell, as his essay ‘On Hypochondria’ suggests: ‘I have generally found the reading of lives do me most good, by withdrawing my attention from myself to others, and entertaining me in the most satisfactory manner with real incidents in the varied course of human existence. I look upon the Biographia Britannica with that kind of grateful regard with which one who has been recovered from painful indisposition by their medicinal springs beholds Bath, Bristol, or Tunbridge’ (Bailey, ed., Boswell’s Column, p. 51).

134. Boswell’s Journal of A Tour, p. 300, n. 8.

135. Piozzi, Anecdotes, pp. 31-3.

136. Boswell, Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides (1785), p. 525.

137. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 358.

138. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 222–3. Note the Johnsonian principle, as expressed in a letter of 27 June 1758 to Bennet Langton: ‘It is a rule never to be forgotten, that whatever strikes strongly, should be described while thefirst impression remains fresh upon the mind’ (ibid., p. 180). However, note that when Johnson tested Boswell’s ‘way of taking notes’ by reading ‘slowly and distinctly’ a passage from Robertson’s History of America, it emerged that Boswell had recorded the passage ‘very imperfectly’ (ibid., pp. 668–9). On Boswell’s method, see Geoffrey Scott, ‘The Making of the Life of Johnson as Shown in Boswell’s First Notes’, in James L. Clifford, ed., Boswell’s Life of Johnson: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), pp. 27–39.

139. Fanny Burney, Memoirs of Dr. Burney, 3 vols. (London: Edward Moxon, 1832), II, 194.

140. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 115, n. 5. To this Boswell replied that Johnson ‘was at all times flattered by my preserving what fell from his mind when shaken by conversation’ – a metaphor also present in the passage in the Life where Boswell records Johnson’s pleasure, on looking at Boswell’s journal, at finding there ‘so much of the fruit of his mind preserved’ (ibid., p. 114; Life of Johnson, below, p. 664).

141. Boswell for the Defence, p. 179.

142. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 373–4.

143. A recurrent subject in the Life is that of literary forgery: cf. ibid., pp. 87, 192–3. As well as reflecting light on the process which produced the Life itself, literary forgery brings together the eighteenth-century fondness for imposture and the contemporary patchiness of solid knowledge which gave that imposture scope to operate – on both of which Johnson comments in the Life (ibid., p. 220 (fondness for imposture) and 307 (patchiness of knowledge)). On the general subject of literary forgery in the eighteenth century, see Paul Baines, The House of Forgery in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).

144. On the embroidery of memory in Boswell, consider F. A. Pottle’s judgement: ‘One also frequently finds Boswell adding sentences and paragraphs to portions of fully written journal. Some of these additions seem to be authentic but undated recollections for which he had to find plausible points of attachment; others, I have no doubt, are a second crop of memory, gathered as he relived the matter he had copied’ (F. A. Pottle, ‘The Life of Johnson: Art and Authenticity’, in James L. Clifford, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Boswell’s Life of Johnson (Engle-wood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 69.

145. Life of Johnson, below, p. 244.

146. Ibid., p. 539.

147. Ibid., pp. 346–7.

148. Ibid., p. 5.

149. Ibid., p. 9.

150. Ibid., p. 892. Compare also the inclusion of Steevens’s reminiscences: ibid., pp. 942–3.

151. Ibid., pp. 763–81, 320–31.