Left to himself and the guidance of the writer Derrick, 'my first tutor in the ways of London, who shewed me the town in all its variety of departments, both literary and sportive,' he was now busily spelling through the pages of the Gull's Hornbook. From this course of idle dissipation he was saved by the interposition of an Ayrshire neighbour of the family, the Earl of 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.