'I suppose you thought,' he roughly said, 'I was to bring you into Parliament? I never had any such intention.' It is impossible not to feel for Boswell at this crisis. 'I am down at an inn,' he writes to Temple, 'and ashamed and sunk on account of the disappointment of hopes which led me to endure such grievances. I deserve all that I suffer. I am at the same time distracted what to do in my own county. I am quite in a fever. O my old and most intimate friend, I intreat you to afford me some consolation, and pray do not divulge my mortification. I now resign my Recordership, and shall get rid of all connection with this brutal fellow.' His last Parliamentary venture was cut short by the reflection how small was his following. How curiously after all this reads his own little autobiographical sketch in the _European Magazine_! 'It was generally supposed that Mr Boswell would have had a seat in Parliament; and indeed his not being amongst the Representatives of the Commons is one of those strange things which occasionally happen in the complex operations of our mixed Government. That he has not been _brought into Parliament_ by some great man is not to be wondered at when we peruse his publick declaration.' Not to be wondered at, truly, though the writer chose to refer the wonder to his independence. Then the reader is informed how he had been a candidate at the general election for his own county of Ayr, 'where he has a very extensive property and a very fine place of which there is a view and description in Grose's _Antiquities of Scotland_.' The conclusion of the sketch relates how, at the last Lord Mayor's day, he sang with great applause a state-ballad of his own composition, entitled _The Grocer of London_. This was the last shot in the political locker. At a Guildhall dinner, given to Pitt by the worshipful company of grocers, Boswell contrived to get himself called upon for a song. He rose, and delivered himself of a catch on the model of Dibdin's 'Little cherub that sits up aloft,' prefaced and interlarded by an address to the guest of the evening. Honoured as he had been on his continental tour at the courts of Europe, yet never till to-night had he felt himself so flattered as now he was, in the presence of the minister he admired, and to whose home and foreign policy he gave a hearty, if discriminating support. Boswell for his song was encored six times, till the cold features of the minister were seen to relax in a smile, amid the general roar of plaudits and laughter! After this 'state ballad,' a copy of which was last seen at Lord Houghton's sale, Bozzy and a friend, in a state of high glee, returned to their lodgings, shouting all the way _The Grocer of London_! 'He has declared,' adds the complacent autobiographer, 'his resolution to persevere on the next vacancy.'