dedication of
the first edition to Paoli was dated on his own birthday, and the book
ran to a third edition before the October of the same year. As purchased
by the Dillys for a hundred guineas it would appear to have been a
profitable speculation, and the wide circulation to which it attained we
shall see was not merely due to accident but to more solid qualities.
'Pray read,' says Horace Walpole to his friend Gray, 'the new account of
Corsica. The author is a strange being, and has a rage of knowing
everybody that ever was talked of. He forced himself upon me at Paris in
spite of my teeth and my doors.' 'Mr B.'s book,' replies Gray--with a
curious anticipation of the Carlylean canon of criticism--'has pleased
and moved me strangely; all I mean that relates to Paoli. The pamphlet
proves, what I have always maintained, that any fool may write a most
valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw
_with veracity_. Of Mr B.'s book I have not the least suspicion, because
I am sure he could invent nothing of the kind. The title of this part of
his work is a dialogue between a Green Goose and a Hero.' But Gray was
fastidious, in this case blindly so. The merits of Goldsmith he could
when dying perceive, but the rollicking humour of Bozzy in this his
first book was sealed to the recluse critic who 'never spoke out,' a
thing that never could be safely asserted of the author of the _Tour in
Corsica_.

That 'authour,' however, was now bent on extracting the sanction of
approval from his idol. He hastened to London, heralding his arrival, as
was his wont, by a deftly contributed paragraph to the papers. The
society journals of to-day have not improved on Boswell in their method
of obtaining first hand information; he was a most assiduous chronicler
of his own actions, and there can be no doubt that there is much Boswell
'copy' buried in the pages of the papers of the time. From the _Public
Advertizer_ of February 28th we learn 'James Boswell, Esq., is expected
in town,' and, on March 24th, 'yesterday James Boswell, Esq., arrived
from Scotland at his lodgings in Half Moon Street, Piccadilly.' He had
received no letter from Johnson since the one in which the Latinity of
his thesis had been criticised, and Boswell had heard that the
publication in his book of a letter from his friend had given offence to
its writer. Johnson was in Oxford at the time, and thither flew Bozzy to
obtain the approval of his labours