Like many other people, I have been reading the new
Boswell Journal (reviewed in the Spectator last week) The exciting thing about it, of course, is its discovery a hundred and seventy years after it was written, at Fettercairn House in Scotland. Even so, if it had not been by Boswell it would have attracted little attention, just as Boswell himself, if he had not written the Life of Johnson, would have attracted little attention. There is little to admire in the Boswell revealed here. He was incredibly vain, inordinately licentious and in his occasional lapses into philosophy intolerably trite. But he was at this time only 23, and the marked contrast between the Boswell of the Journal and the Boswell of Johnson no doubt springs from the fact that in the one case he was writing about a great man and in the other largely about a set of young roues, like Eglinton and Erskine ; the later Boswell was a different man. Incidentally some passages in the book are filthier than any- thing I have read anywhere, and, much as I dislike excisions, it seems to me open to grave question whether they should have been printed. It is surely sufficient to reproduce dr: monotonously frequent entry "picked up a whore" without proceeding to a detailed and often disgusting description of the operations that follow ; there are depths of the sordid which it is unnecessary to plumb. It is usual to excuse much in the author of a classic, but the fact that Boswell wrote a classic later in life has no bearing on his much earlier account of his comparatively worthless youth. * * * *
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