He resolves to do better when his book on Corsica appears, and he has the reputation of a literary man to support. Meanwhile, he confesses:--
I last night unwarily exceeded my one bottle of old Hock; and having once broke over the pale, I run wild, but I did not get drunk. I was, however, intoxicated, and very ill next day. I ask your forgiveness, and I shall be more cautious for the future. The drunken manners of this country are very bad.
Boswell's affairs with chambermaids, grass widows, and women of the town moved along simultaneously with efforts to land an heiress. He asks Temple to help him in an affair with a Miss Blair. Temple did his best and failed. He reported his failure and Boswell was deeply dejected for five minutes; then he writes:
My dear friend, suppose what you please; suppose her affections changed, as those of women too often are; suppose her offended at my _Spanish stateliness_ [italics mine]; suppose her to have resolved to be more reserved and coy in order to make me more in love.
Then he felt that he must have a change of scene, and off he was to London.
I got into the fly at Buckden [he says], and had a very good journey. An agreeable young widow nursed me, and supported my lame foot on her knee. Am I not fortunate in having something about me that interests most people at first sight in my favour?
In a letter to Mrs. Thrale, Johnson once wrote: "It has become so much the fashion to publish letters that in order to avoid it, I put as little into mine as I can." Boswell was not afraid of publication. His fear, as he said, was that letters, like sermons, would not continue to attract public curiosity, so he spiced his highly. Did he do or say a foolish thing, he at once sat down and told Temple all about it, usually adding that in the near future he intended to amend. His comment on his contemporaries is characteristic. "Hume," he says, "told me that he would give me half-a-crown for every page of Johnson's Dictionary in which he could not find an absurdity, if I would give him half-a-crown for every page in which he could find one."
He announces Adam Smith's election to membership in the famous literary club by saying: "Smith is now of our club--it has lost its select merit." Of Gibbon he says: "I hear nothing of the publication of his second volume. He is an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow, and poisons our literary club to me."