'Love,' wrote Madame de Stael, 'is with man a thing apart, 'tis woman's whole existence.' This is not true at least of Boswell, for his love affairs fill as large a part in his life as in that of Benjamin Constant. A most confused chapter withal, and one that luckily was not known to Macaulay, whose colours would otherwise have been more brilliant. We find Bozzy paying his addresses at one and the same time to at least eight ladies, exclusive as this is of sundry minor divinities of a fleeting and more temporary nature not calling here for allusion. His first divinity was the grass-widow of Moffat, and here Temple had been compelled to remonstrate in spite of all the lover's philandering about her freedom from her husband, who had used her ill. Were she unfaithful, he declares her worthy to be 'pierced with a Corsican dagger,' but in March he has found it too much like a 'settled plan of licentiousness,' discovering her to be an ill-bred rompish girl, debasing his dignity, without refinement, though handsome and lively. Then there is the quarrel and the reconciliation, she vowing she loved him more than ever she had done her husband, but meeting with opposition from his brother David and others, who furnished the love-sick heart of her adorer with examples of her faithlessness such as made him recoil. He vows now his frailties are at an end, and he resolves to turn out an admirable member of society. He had broken with her as with the gardener's daughter a year ago--an everlasting lesson to him.