I have answered him in my own style: I will be myself.... Would you not be pleased to see your son happy in independence, cultivating his little farm and ornamenting his nuptial villa, and filling himself one day, as well as possible, the place of a much greater man? Temple, would you not like such a son? Would you not feel a glow of parental joy? I know you would; and yet my worthy father writes to me in the manner you see, with that Scots strength of sarcasm which is peculiar to a North Briton. But he is offended with that fire which you and I cherish as the essence of our soul; and how can I make him happy?[19] But if all fools are alike in so far as they have this common foundation upon which the flimsy fabric of folly is erected, yet they differ widely in the manner of their foolishness. To say that a man is a fool is to say but little of all that is meant by the expression in his individual case. Boswell was a fool in a number of ways which we shall now have to consider. The extract of Boswell's letter to his father which we have quoted above in his letter to Temple is typical of one phase of all his foolishness. The impulse which made him write in this place about 'cultivating his little farm and ornamenting his nuptial villa' is one which he frequently had. It is difficult to find a name which exactly fits it. It is the melodramatic instinct applied to real life. The words which he uses in this case contain a sentiment beyond the mere facts they represent; and it is a false sentiment--false not because he did not feel it, but because there was no occasion for it; sentiment is wasted. In Boswell there was a sentimental side to the affectation that we have already spoken of as having been partially cured by Johnson. It is not meant, by this expression, that Boswell consciously assumed sentiment which he did not feel: we cannot always tell whether he was conscious or not; and it does not matter. Affectation implies only the presence of what is unreal; it is concerned as much with the feeling of what is false as with falsely pretending to feel.