Your last letter supposes too truly my situation. With grief continually at my heart, I have been endeavouring to seek relief in dissipation and in wine, so that my life for some time past has been unworthy of myself, of you, and of all that is valuable in my character and connections. For a week past, as the common phrase is, ‘I have taken up,’ and by a more regular and quiet course find myself, I think, rather better.” As in the case of his “Tour to the Hebrides,” Boswell submitted each successive chapter of the “Life of Johnson” to the revision of Mr. Malone. In his letter to Mr. Temple of the 28th November he remarks:— “The revision of my ‘Life of Johnson’ by so acute and knowing a critic as Mr. Malone is of most essential consequence, especially as he is _Johnsonianissimus_; and as he is to hasten to Ireland as soon as his Shakspere[93] is fairly published, I must avail myself of him _now_. His hospitality and my other invitations, and particularly my attendance at Lord Lonsdale’s, have lost us many evenings; but I reckon that a third of the work is settled, so that I shall get to press very soon. You cannot imagine what labour, what perplexity, what vexation I have endured in arranging a prodigious multiplicity of materials, in supplying omissions, in searching for papers, buried in different masses, and all this besides the exertion of composing and polishing. Many a time have I thought of giving it up. However, though I shall be uneasily sensible of its many deficiencies, it will certainly be to the world a very valuable and peculiar volume of biography, full of literary and characteristical anecdotes (which word, by the way, Johnson always condemned, as used in the sense that the French, and we from them, use it, as signifying particulars), told with authenticity, and in a lively manner. Would that it were in the booksellers’ shops! Methinks, if I had this _magnum opus_ launched, the public has no further claim upon me; for I have promised no more, and I may die in peace, or retire into dull obscurity, _reddarque tenebris_.” Writing to Mr. Temple on the 8th February, 1790, Boswell thus reports progress:—