Fortune followed him wherever he turned. George, tenth Earl Marischal, and brother of Frederick the Great's general, Marshal Keith, had joined the Earl of Mar in the rising of 1715, and had made an ineffectual descent in 1719 on Glenshiel with the Spaniards. But in the '45 he had taken no part, and he revealed to the British Government the existence of the Bourbon Family Compact. In return, his attainder had been removed by George II., and on his brief visit to Scotland he had lived with Boswell's father in Ayrshire, perhaps as a friend of the Commissioners for the forfeited estates, when the occasion had been seized by Macpherson for an ode, 'attempted after the manner of Pindar,' in the fustian style of the translator of Ossian. With him or by his credentials Boswell went the round of the German courts, passing by Mannheim and Geneva, reaching the latter towards the end of December. The reader is struck with the airy assurance and self-possession which the laureate of the Soapers and the Newmarket Cub manifests on the grand tour, conducting himself at three and twenty with complete success at the courts of German princes, conversing with plenipotentiaries and dignitaries of all sorts in French and Italian, for German had not yet risen into sufficient historical or diplomatic importance to add to the linguistic burdens of mankind. Lord Marischal as the governor of Neufchatel had acted as the protector of Rousseau, and so was able to furnish his companion with a letter of introduction, hinting at his enthusiastic nature and describing him to the philosopher as a visionary hypochondriac. Voltaire he interviewed at Ferney, and he managed to please the great man by repeating--a characteristic trait of Bozzy, who believed such tale-bearing to be vastly conducive to the practice of benevolence--Johnson's criticism upon Frederick the Great's writings, 'such as you may suppose Voltaire's foot-boy to do, who has been his amanuensis.' He broached the subject of the philosophy of the unconscious, and was eager to know how ideas forgotten at the time were yet later on recollected. The other replied by a quotation from Thomson's _Winter_ with the writer's question, as to the winds, 'In what far distant region of the sky Hushed in silence sleep ye when 'tis calm?'