Well, and what then? Let me shift about to another subject. The best I can think of is a sound sleep; so good-night.' In fact, like Sir Fretful Plagiary in the _Critic_, Bozzy was so covetous of popularity that he would rather be abused than be not mentioned at all. Little augury, too, of success at the bar could his father find in the following portrait of his son: 'the author of the _Ode to Tragedy_ is a most excellent man; he is of an ancient family in the west of Scotland, upon which he values himself not a little. At his nativity there appeared omens of his future greatness; his parts are bright, and his education has been good; he has travelled in post-chaises miles without number; he is fond of seeing much of the world; he eats of every good dish, especially apple pie; he drinks old hock; he has a very fine temper; he is somewhat of a humourist, and a little tinctured with pride; he has a good, manly countenance, and he owns himself to be amorous; he has infinite vivacity; yet is at times observed to have a melancholy cast.' Nothing but the most obtuse vanity could ever have induced Bozzy to publish all this. 'Curiosity,' he declares in the preface, 'is the most prevalent of all our passions, and the curiosity for reading letters is the most prevalent of all kinds of curiosity. Had any man in the three kingdoms found the following letters directed, sealed, and addressed, with post-marks--provided he could have done so honestly--he would have read every one of them.' There is the true Boswell in this characteristic confession, the Boswell that read in the private diaries of Johnson, and, with an eye to biographical materials, had admitted an impulse to carry them off, and never see him more. 'Why, sir,' said the doctor, 'I do not think you could have helped it.' After this it was no wonder that his father was induced to allow his return to London, 'Where a man may soap his own beard, and enjoy whatever is to be had in this transitory state of things, and every agreeable whim may be indulged without censure.' The Duke of Queensbery, the patron of Gay, was one of those to whom he was recommended now that he inclined to 'persist in his fondness for the Guards, or rather, in truth, for the metropolis,' but he suspected some arrangement between his father and the Duke by which the commission was delayed. For some months he spent a random life as the occupier of Temple's chambers in the vicinity of Johnson. Little could be expected of the friend of Churchill and Wilkes, yet Boswell now was at the turning point of his career.