James Boswell. W. Keith Leask
Eglintoun, though were we to credit the account of the waif himself the Earl 'insisted that young Boswell should have an apartment in his house.' Certain it is that by his lordship he was taken to Newmarket and introduced to the members of the Jockey Club. He would appear to have fancied himself a regularly elected member, for here his eccentricity broke forth into a yet more violent form. Calling for pen and paper, while the sporting fraternity gathered round, he produced the Cub at Newmarket, which he printed and dedicated to the Duke of York in a characteristically Boswellian strain. In doggerel which defies rhyme or reason he tells how his patron
'By chance a curious cub has got
On Scotia's mountains newly caught;'
and then—the first of his many portraits drawn by himself, and prophetic of the lover of hospitable boards and good cheer as we know him in his works—he describes the writer as
'Not of the iron race
Which sometimes Caledonia grace;
Though he to combat should advance,
Plumpness shone in his countenance;
And belly prominent declared
That he for beef and pudding cared;
He had a large and ponderous head,
That seemed to be composed of lead;
From which hung down such stiff, lank hair,
As might the crows in autumn scare.'
At this time it is likely took place the escapade with which he must have convulsed the gravity of the Edinburgh literati invited to meet Johnson on their return from the Hebrides. 'I told, when Dr. Hugh Blair was sitting with me in the pit of Drury Lane, in a wild freak of youthful extravagance I entertained the audience prodigiously by imitating the lowing of a cow. I was so successful in this boyish frolic that the universal cry of the galleries was "encore the cow." In the pride of my heart I attempted imitations of other animals, but with very inferior effect.' Blair's advice was, says Scott, 'Stick to the coo, man,' in his peculiar burr, but we can imagine how this unforeseen reminiscence must have confused the divine. After an ineffectual effort to enter himself at the Inner Temple, the 'cub' had to return in April 1761 to Edinburgh.
Old Edinburgh was nothing if not convivial. Writing to Temple and confessing that his London life had 'not been entirely as it ought to be,' he appeals to him for pity in his present surroundings. Imagine 'a young fellow,' he cries, 'whose happiness was always centred in London, hauled away to the town of Edinburgh, obliged to conform to every Scottish custom, or be laughed at—"Will ye hae some jeel? Oh fie, oh fie!"—his flighty imagination quite cramped, and be obliged to study Corpus Juris Civilis and live in his father's strict family; is there any wonder, sir, that the unlucky dog should be somewhat fretful? Yoke a Newmarket courser to a dung cart, and I'll lay my life on't he'll either caper or kick most confoundedly, or be as stupid and restive as an old battered post-horse.' Among the many clubs of the time Boswell instituted a jovial society called the Soaping Club which met weekly in a tavern. The motto of the members was 'Every man soap his own beard,' a rather recondite witticism which their founder declares equivalent to the reigning phrase of 'Every man in his humour.' It may be suggested here that in this company of feeble Bacchanalians Boswell had copied the Rabelaisian fay ce que vous voudras of the Franciscans of Medmenham Abbey with Sandwich, Wilkes, and others. At any rate, as their self-constituted laureate, he produced the following extraordinary song, which can be paralleled for inanity only by the stave he sang before Pitt in the Guildhall of London, as a means of attracting the notice of the Premier with a view to Parliament. The song is characteristically Boswellian.
'Boswell of Soapers the King
On Tuesdays at Tom's does appear,
And when he does talk or does sing,
To him ne'er a one can come near.
For he talks with such ease and such grace,
That all charm'd to attention we sit,
And he sings with so comic a face
That our sides are just ready to split.
Boswell is modest enough,
Himself not quite Phœbus he thinks,
He never does flourish with snuff,
And hock is the liquor he drinks.
And he owns that Ned Colquet the priest
May to something of honour pretend,
And he swears that he is not in jest,
When he calls this same Colquet his friend.
Boswell is pleasant and gay,
For frolic by nature design'd;
He heedlessly rattles away
When the company is to his mind.
"This maxim," he says, "you may see,
We never can have corn without chaff;"
So not a bent sixpence cares he,
Whether with him or at him you laugh.
Boswell does women adore,
And never once means to deceive,
He's in love with at least half a score;
If they're serious he smiles in his sleeve.
He has all the bright fancy of youth,
With the judgment of forty and five;
In short, to declare the plain truth,
There is no better fellow alive.'
This, it must be confessed, is sad stuff even for a laureate of twenty, and is jesting with difficulty. Every man, says Johnson, has at one time or other of his life an ambition to set up for a wag, but that a man who had completed the Life of Johnson should in after years complacently refer to this character of himself and 'traits in it which time has not yet altered, that egotism and self-applause which he is still displaying, yet it would seem with a conscious smile,' is scarcely credible were it not out-distanced by graver weaknesses.
For about this date he published An Elegy upon the Death of an Amiable Young Lady, flanked by three puffing epistles from himself and his friends, Erskine and Dempster. In the same year appeared his Ode to Tragedy—by a Gentleman of Scotland, with a dedication to—James Boswell, Esq.!—'for your particular kindness to me, and chiefly for the profound respect with which you have always treated me.' We hear of his 'old hock' humour, a favourite phrase with him for his Bacchanalian tastes, and we find the author limning himself as possessing
'A soul by nature formed to feel
Grief sharper than the tyrant's steel,
And bosom big with swelling thought
From ancient lore's remembrance brought.'
In 1760 had appeared a Collection of Original Poems, published by Donaldson in Edinburgh on the model of Dodsley's Miscellanies. It comprised poems by Blacklock, Beattie, and others, and a second volume was issued by Erskine as editor in 1762. To it Boswell contributed nearly thirty pieces along with Home, the author of Douglas, Macpherson of Ossian fame or notoriety, John Maclaurin and others. The merits of the volume are beneath notice, and Boswell's contributions of Odes, Epigrams, Letters, Epistles, are of the traditional character; but An Epistle from a London Buck to his Friend must have been read by his father with regret, and by his mother of 'almost unexampled piety and goodness' with shame. There is only one poem that calls for attention, the Evening Walk in the Abbey Church of Holyrood House, the original, perhaps, of Fergusson's lament on the state of neglect of the then deserted mansion of royalty, where
'the thistle springs
In domicile of ancient Kings,
Without a patriot to regret
Our palace and our ancient state.'
A third volume was announced for publication 'about eighteen months hence,'