All this time his great work was slowly advancing. At the end of the _Journal_ had appeared a notice: 'preparing for the Press, in one volume quarto, the _Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D._, by James Boswell, Esq.' The note proceeds to sketch the plan; the collecting of materials for more than twenty years, his desire to erect to him a literary monument, the interweaving of 'the most authentick accounts' that can be obtained from those who knew him, etc. To his chagrin, Mrs Thrale's volume of anecdotes had been out before him, and Sir John Hawkins had been commissioned by the London booksellers to produce a _Life_, which had duly appeared. Not even the unequivocal success and merits of the _Journal_ could induce 'the trade' to take Boswell seriously. No one had thought of him, any more than Gay would have been thought of as the biographer of the circle to which he had been admitted. Percy, even Sir William Scott, had been successively approached, but none had given a consideration to 'Johnson's Bozzy.' Such neglect, however, must have spurred him to exertion. The lively lady's anecdotage, dateless and confused, he could afford to despise as 'too void of method even for such a farrago,' as Horace Walpole said of it. But the solemn Hawkins, as an old friend and executor of Johnson's will, was a more dangerous rival. 'Observe how he talks of me,' cries Boswell querulously, 'as quite unknown.' No doubt Sir John was 'unclubable,' and by Reynolds, Dyer, Percy, and Malone he was detested. Yet his book, though eclipsed by Boswell's, is not unmeritorious; but for his allusion to 'Mr Boswell, a native of Scotland,' he has been made to pay severely by systematic castigation from his rival, who now doggedly, as Johnson would have said, set himself to the work before him. Wherever first-hand information could be had, he was constantly on the track. Miss Burney has told how she met him at the gate of the choir of St George's chapel at Windsor--'his comic-serious face having lost none of its wonted singularity, nor yet his mind and language.' She had letters from Johnson, and he must have some of the doctor's choice little notes: 'We have seen him long enough upon stilts, I want to shew him in a new light. He proposed a thousand curious expedients to get them, but I was invincible.' The approach of the king and queen broke off the interview, but next morning he was again on the watch. We must regret that they were not given, however much his indiscretions had made people chary of their confidences. 'Jemmy Boswell,' writes Lord Eldon, 'called upon me, desiring to know my definition of taste. I told him I must decline defining it, because I knew he would publish it.' To secure first-hand, sifted, and 'authentick' material this man, so long decried by sciolists as merely a fool with a note-book, would forego every rebuff or refusal. 'Boswell,' says Horace Walpole, 'that quintessence of busy-bodies called on me last week, and was let in when he should not have been.