Temple, I wish to be at last an uniform, pretty man. I am astonishingly so already, but I wish to be a man who deserves Miss B.... I am always for fixing some period for my perfection as far as possible. Let it be when my account of Corsica is published; I shall then have a character which I must support. I will swear, like an ancient disciple of Pythagoras, to observe silence; I will be grave and reserved, though cheerful and communicative of what is _verum atque decens_. One great fault of mine is talking at random; I will guard against it. It is amusing to think of Boswell in this _rôle_. Already we may see the great contest in his life between natural candour and commonplace ambition--the charm of the 'Tour to Corsica' was the charm of candour, and it was dangerous to dreams of future greatness in the sphere of public affairs. Boswell understood that to gain respect he must be more serious. But this he never was able to be; it was his nature to be extravagant. He had a mind which in some respects was wholly unconventional, and though he tried sometimes, he could never entirely repress his feelings: the consequence was that though there were many things about which he cared very much, it was never possible to take him quite seriously; if a man plays the buffoon sometimes we are in danger of being fooled if we give him credit for being in earnest; and so, if we are to preserve our _amour propre_, which is what everybody wants to do, we must laugh at a buffoon whatever he does. A most notable piece of Boswell's buffoonery was in connection with the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford-on-Avon in 1769. He attended this festival dressed as an armed Corsican chief. This perhaps was not particularly odd; the form of rejoicing which the company indulged in was a 'Mask.' It is dangerous even so, and hardly decent, to blow the personal trumpet so loudly. Boswell, however, was not content merely with the public advertisement of his connexion with Corsica; he wrote to the _London Magazine_[11] an elaborate unsigned account of himself and his costume: it was entitled 'Account of the Armed Corsican Chief at the Masquerade at Shakespeare's Jubilee, with a fine whole-length portrait of James Boswell, Esq., in the dress of an armed Corsican chief, as he appeared at the Jubilee Mask.' There is no need to give here the text of this document: it has been quoted at length a number of times, and it suffices to say that there can be no possible doubt that Boswell wrote it and that he wrote it to exhibit himself in a favourable light. The incident is characteristic of Boswell. It is not the mad whim that may occur once in a lifetime, the event which stands as it were by itself apart from the man; it is not an experiment miscarried, that has taken him away from his usual self and so must remain unexplained or be put to the long account of genius: rather it is the sort of oddity that we come to expect of Boswell.