A life which cannot challenge the world's attention--like that of John Sterling--which perhaps does not even modestly solicit it, yet one which no less certainly will be found to reward the critic of literary history and pathology. A complex, weak, unsteady life enough, and no one did more than Boswell himself to bring into glaring prominence the faults that lie on the surface, by that frank, open, and ostentatious peculiarity which he avowed, and which he compared to the characteristics of the old seigneur, Michael de Montaigne. Never was there a franker critic of James Boswell, Esq., than himself; 'the most unscottified of mortals,' as Johnson called him, has little or none of the reserve and reticence that are generally supposed to be marks of the national character. A rare and curious _Epistle in Verse_, by the Rev. Samuel Martin of Monimail, 1795, touches on the main points of his life, and the author, who was apparently a friend of Boswell, had learned 'with affectionate concern and respect that at the end prayer was his stay.' He criticises, in rather halting and prosaic lines, 'The prison scenes, his prying into death, How felons and how saints resign their breath; How varying and conflicting passions roll, How scaffold exhibitions shew the soul.' He laments his 'injurious hilarity,' his degrading himself as 'the little bark, attendant on the huge all-bearing ark,' his political and ecclesiastical aberrations from the surer and better standpoints of his family and country. The feeling of this friend of Boswell would represent, we cannot doubt, the verdict at the time of his own circle.