Boswell, however, though he was continually posing, posed not for others but for himself. He had an insatiable greed of sensation. He derived prodigious pleasure from the view of himself in a situation. 'I cannot resist,' he says, 'the serious pleasure of writing to Mr. Johnson from the tomb of Melancthon. My paper rests upon the tomb of that great and good man.' While he wrote the letter he admired the scene he had arranged. He admired himself playing every kind of _rôle_; he could be the grave author, or the romantic lover, the scholar of 'solid learning' or the elegant man of the world, the sage counsellor or the jolly good fellow, the enthusiast for liberty who talked heroics with Paoli and politics with Chatham, explorer and diplomat, the feudal lord or the humble paterfamilias of a rustic domesticity; he could be literary, theological, pious, philosophical, legal, or political, as occasion suited, with profound enjoyment of the part he was acting. He delighted in the solemnity of a vow, and even had a taste for the solitude of a hermit: 'Sometimes,' he exclaims, 'I have been in the humour of wishing to retire to a desert.' His gust for London was the same gust for sensation; and his pursuit of distinguished men was partly for the sake of an added zest and excitement from their company. 'You can almost see him,' says Lionel Johnson, 'reckoning up, as it were, on his plump fingers, his eminent acquaintances, the cities and courts he has visited, his writings and flirtations and experiences in general: they are his treasures and his triumphs. The acquisition of Johnson was but the greatest of them all, his crowning achievement; all his life was devoted to social _coups d'état_. To hear service in an Anglican cathedral, to attend an exceptionally choice murderer to the gallows; to contrive a meeting between Johnson and Wilkes;... to pray among the ruins of Iona, and to run away for fear of ghosts; to turn Roman Catholic, and immediately to run away with an actress: each and all of these performances were to him sensational, enlivening, vivid.' Boswell was not unaware of this extravagance in his temperament. He alludes to his 'warm imagination.' In 'Boswelliana,' pleased at having found 'a good image,' he records: There have been many people who built castles in the air; but, I believe, I am the first who ever attempted to live in them. By castles in the air, he means not only glorious plans for the future, but the sensational and emotional in common incidents. A moment during the 'Tour to the Hebrides' reveals the whole of what he meant: I can never forget the impression made upon my fancy by some of the ladies' maids tripping about in neat morning dresses. After seeing for a long time little but rusticity, their lively appearance pleased me so much that I thought for a moment I could have been a knight-errant for them.