It is probable that Boswell was in earnest both about the young lady and about his religion. But since, in order to be entirely respectable, it is often necessary to give a hypocritical consistency to our fickle inclinations, we are not thought to be serious if we do not affect to be constant. We can assume, in the case of most people, from a sort of faith they hold in the durability of sentiment, and a desire which they have to prove by a time test the depth of their emotion, that the feelings which do not appear to endure are trivial and shallow. In Boswell's case we cannot make this assumption; though he affected much, he yet had real and vivid feelings; but since they could never be wholly dissociated from the pleasure which they gave him, they were both various and contradictory; he could be grave and sedate at one moment and gay and boyish the next, yet really feeling something both of the gravity and the gaiety of living; he could be almost in the same breath either the romantic lover or the indifferent cynic, and yet feel something both of the romance of love and of the aloofness which has tasted often enough the joys and sorrows of life; he forgot more quickly than most men, but did not care very often--while it was part of his inconsistency that he did sometimes care--to conceal the fundamental elasticity of his nature. This volatility of Boswell, exhibited especially in his sexual inconstancy, was in itself but a phase of an innate and irrepressible candour which, in spite of a lifelong desire and struggle for respectability, showed itself very often to his friend Temple in the 'Letters,' and not infrequently also to the general public. In all that he wrote we find passages of amazing frankness about matters which most men would prefer to conceal. He was absurdly vain, he was childishly sanguine, he was often both foolish and ridiculous, and he tells us all about it as a matter that should interest us as well as him. 'Why,' he says, '"out of the abundance of the heart" should I not speak?' The light of truth led him into strange paths. He was a formalist and yet he was sometimes known to fail in formalism through an aversion to insincerity; when his enemy Baretti came, by chance, into the room where he was being entertained by a friend, Boswell refused to greet him; he could even be flagrantly rude in company. To be entirely respectable and conventional, to be the man of the world, the gentleman of society, that is what Boswell wanted most in life; and that he never could become, because there was in his nature a further consciousness, which was not to be subdued, and which determined, by reason of the curious inconsistency so produced, his whole capacity for interesting mankind, for fame, for greatness.