ken seriously.
Nothing could be more remote from the truth. The Whigs were in favour
of his views, and Burke, together with Frederick the Great, believed our
interests would suffer by the increase of French power in the
Mediterranean. Shelburne, for Chatham had resigned before November 1768,
was the advocate of similar views, telling our ambassador at Versailles
to remonstrate with the French court, while Junius, in his letter to the
Duke of Grafton, told the country that Corsica would never have been
invaded by the French, but for the sight of a weak and distracted
ministry. When the hand of Napoleon was heavy on the Genoese, they
remembered that their cession of the island had made their master, by
his birth at Ajaccio on August 15, 1769, a Frenchman. But the nation at
the time of Boswell's books was weary of war, and their influence,
though great, was not visible in any actual political results.

Boswell had expected to draw the sage on the subject of matrimony,
having promised himself, as he says, a good deal of instructive
conversation on the conduct of the married state. But the oracles were
dumb. On his return to the north he was married, on the 25th November
1769, to his cousin. We find in the _Scots Magazine_ of that month the
following extracts under the list of marriages:--

'At Lainshaw, in the shire of Air, JAMES BOSWELL, Esq., of
Auchinleck, advocate, to MISS PEGGY MONTGOMERY, daughter of the
late DAVID MONTGOMERY of Lainshaw, Esq.'

'At Edinburgh, ALEXANDER BOSWELL, Esq., of Auchinleck, one of
the Lords of Session and Justiciary, to Miss BETTY BOSWELL,
second daughter of JOHN BOSWELL, Esq., of Balmuto, deceased.'

His father, now past sixty, had married again, and married a cousin for
the second time, like his son on the present occasion. That they were
married on the same day and at different places affords a clear
indication that the father and son were no longer on the best of terms.

CHAPTER IV

LOVE AFFAIRS--LITERARY CLUB. 1766-73

'How happy could I be with either,
Were t'other dear charmer away.'--GAY.

'Love,' wrote Madame de Stael, 'is with man a thing apart, 'tis woman's
whole existence.' This is not true at least of Boswell, for his love
affairs fill as large a part in his life as in that of Benjamin
Constant. A most confused chapter withal, and one that luckily was not
known to Macaulay, whose colours would otherwise have been more
brilliant. W