“For the black fumes which rise in your mind I can prescribe nothing but that you disperse them by honest business or innocent pleasure, and by reading, sometimes easy and sometimes serious. Change of place is useful, and I hope your residence at Auchinleck will have many good effects.... Never, my dear sir,” added Dr. Johnson, “do you take it in your head to think that I do not love you; you may settle yourself in full confidence both of my love and esteem. I love you as a kind man, I value you as a worthy man, and hope in time to reverence you as a man of exemplary piety. I hold you, as Hamlet has it, ‘in my heart of hearts,’ and therefore it is little to say that I am, sir, your affectionate, humble servant, “SAM. JOHNSON.” To check his “atrabilious” complaint Boswell did not have recourse to reading. He informed Mr. Temple that since his return from England his reading had been confined to some small treatises on midwifery. On the 2nd September he communicated with Mr. Temple from Auchinleck. He had been there a week, and had experienced an unsupportable distress. Next day being Sunday, he proposed to worship in the parish church, and on Monday to join at Edinburgh his “valuable spouse and dear little children.” To his dissension with his father he refers in characteristic fashion:— “My father, whom I really both respect and affectionate (if that is a word, for it is a different feeling from that which is expressed by _love_, which I can say of you from my soul), is so different from me. We _divaricate_ so much, as Dr. Johnson said, that I am often hurt when I dare say he means no harm; and he has a method of treating me which makes me feel myself like a _timid boy_, which to _Boswell_ (comprehending all that my character does in my own imagination and in that of a wonderful number of mankind) is intolerable. His wife, too, whom in my conscience I cannot condemn for any capital bad quality, is so narrow-minded, and, I don’t know how, so set upon keeping him under her own management, and so suspicious and so sourishly tempered that it requires the utmost exertion of practical philosophy to keep myself quiet. I, however, have done so all this week to admiration; nay, I have appeared good-humoured, but it has cost me drinking a considerable quantity of strong beer to dull my faculties....