writes Jortin to Hailes, 'called at my house. I was gone out for the day; he then left your letter and a note with it for me, promising to be with me on Saturday morning. But from that time to this I have heard nothing of him. He began, I suppose, to suspect some design upon him, and his new friends may have represented me to him as a heretic and an infidel, whom he ought to avoid as he would the plague.' More likely the Catholic fit had passed away. But what a light does this phase, erratic even among his countless vagaries, shed on his relation to Johnson! Never, we may rest assured, did he tell the sage of this hidden passage in his life; yet how often do we find him putting leading questions to his friend and Mentor on all points of Catholic doctrine and casuistry, purgatory, and the invocation of the saints, confession, and the mass! There can be no doubt that this wrench left a deep impress on the confused religious views of Boswell, and this is the clue which explains the opening conversation with Johnson at the beginning of their intimacy. 'I acknowledged,' he writes, 'that though educated strictly in the principles of religion, I had for some time been misled into a certain degree of infidelity; but I was now come to a better way of thinking, and was fully satisfied of the truth of the Christian revelation, though I was not clear as to every point considered to be orthodox.' Never in any way does he refer to this episode of his life, but the _Life of Johnson_ is, as we shall have occasion to show, the life in many ways also of its author, who says of himself that, 'from a certain peculiarly frank, open, and ostentatious disposition which he avows, his history, like that of the old Seigneur Michael de Montaigne, is to be traced in his writings.' Left to himself and the guidance of the writer Derrick, 'my first tutor in the ways of London, who shewed me the town in all its variety of departments, both literary and sportive,' he was now busily spelling through the pages of the Gull's Hornbook. From this course of idle dissipation he was saved by the interposition of an Ayrshire neighbour of the family, the Earl of Eglintoun, though were we to credit the account of the waif himself the Earl 'insisted that young Boswell should have an apartment in his house.' Certain it is that by his lordship he was taken to Newmarket and introduced to the members of the Jockey Club. He would appear to have fancied himself a regularly elected member, for here his eccentricity broke forth into a yet more violent form. Calling for pen and paper, while the sporting fraternity gathered round, he produced the _Cub at Newmarket_, which he printed and dedicated to the Duke of York in a characteristically Boswellian strain. In doggerel which defies rhyme or reason he tells how his patron 'By chance a curious cub has got On Scotia's mountains newly caught;'