Boswell's _mots_ are of a common eighteenth-century type. The turn of phrase admired by both Johnson and Boswell and most of their contemporaries was the image. In 'Boswelliana' is a story of Boswell's introduction to Scotch lawyers: 'Boswell had a great aversion to the law, but forced himself to enter upon that laborious profession in compliance with the anxious desire of his father, for whom he had the greatest regard. After putting on the gown he said with great good humour to his brother advocates, 'Gentlemen, I am prest into the service here; but I have observed that a prest man, either by sea or land, after a little time does just as well as a volunteer.' That is Boswell at his best. Here is another specimen of Boswell's wit: 'A modern man of taste found fault with the avenues at Auchinleck, and said he wished to see straggling trees. 'I wish,' said Boswell, 'I could see straggling fools in this world.' That is Boswell at his worst. Why a man who had so much natural humour as Boswell had should have failed so completely to discriminate when his own wit was in question must remain as much a problem to us as is the failure of many a poet to criticise his own writings--the explanation may be perhaps that it requires some special effort of the mind which can but rarely be made and which is impossible after the moment of composition. Boswell certainly seems to have had a high opinion of his efforts to be witty; his verses to Miss Monckton are inserted in the 'Life' with evident pride, and without any excuse of some connection with Johnson such as he usually makes when alluding to his own performances, and he seems frequently to have sung the songs which he composed, obtaining, no doubt, in this way the 'conspicuousness' which he desired.[36] The enjoyment which Boswell had in public at Stratford and at the mayoralty dinner and in private, no doubt, on many occasions of which unfortunately we have no account, is perhaps best illustrated and best understood from a single sentence of his own in one of the 'Letters to Temple': I was the great man (as we used to say) at the late Drawing-Room, in a suit of imperial blue lined with rose-coloured silk, and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons. For the eagerness which Boswell had to reveal to others anything about himself which he was proud of, and a sort of inevitable obtrusiveness in him, Johnson with his usual shrewdness found an excellent parallel which is faithfully recounted in the 'Life': Once when checking my boasting too frequently of myself in company, he said to me, 'Boswell, you often vaunt so much as to provoke ridicule. You put me in mind of a man who was standing in the kitchen of an inn with his back to the fire, and thus accosted the person next him, "Do you know, sir, who I am?" "No, sir," said the other, "I have not that advantage." "Sir," said he, "I am the _great Twalmley_, who invented the New Floodgate Iron."'