Authors, Scottish -- 18th century -- Biography; Biographers -- Great Britain -- Biography; Boswell, James, 1740-1795
wrapper was a scrap of a letter, which formed part of a bundle bought
shortly before from a travelling hawker. On investigation, the letters
were found to be the correspondence of Boswell with Temple, and all
doubts as to their genuineness were conclusively set at rest by their
bearing the London and Devon post marks, and the franks of well known
names. But the internal evidence alone, as we shall see, would be
sufficient to establish their authenticity. Published in 1857 by
Bentley, under the careful editorship of Mr Francis, they constitute,
along with the no less happy discovery in 1854, behind an old press in
Sydney, of Campbell's _Diary of a Visit to England_--though Professor
Jowett was inclined to doubt the authenticity of the latter--the most
valuable accession of evidence to the Johnsonian circle of interest, and
they shed on Boswell and his method a light which otherwise would leave
much in darkness, or, at least, but ensure a general acceptance of the
harsher features in the criticism by Macaulay. From the remark by
Boswell to Temple--'remember and put my letters into a book neatly; see
which of us does it first,' it has been inferred that he meditated, in
some sort of altered appearance, their republication. That Temple
entertained the same idea on his part we know from his own words, and
from the title under which Boswell suggested their issue--_Remarks on
Various Authors, in a Series of Letters to James Boswell, Esq._ But that
Boswell himself ever did intend the publication of his own must be
pronounced, by all that know what lies behind their printed form, a
moral impossibility.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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