aged to remind their excellencies of a certain _Tour in
Corsica_ emanating thence. Auchinleck was visited to 'the joy of my
worthy father and me at seeing the Corsican Hero in our romantick
groves,' as he tells Garrick, and on their return to Glasgow the freedom
of the city was conferred on Paoli by Lord Provost Dunlop.[A] At
Edinburgh 'the general slept under the roof of his ever grateful
friend.' The whole forms a favourable specimen of Boswell's organizing
capacities, and viewed in relation to the friendly intercourse he is
found maintaining with prominent and influential persons, our regret is
but increased that in the interests of his wife and children his
abilities were not exercised in a more strictly professional channel.

London he visited in the March of 1772 over an appeal to the Lords from
the Court of Session. Johnson was now in good health, and was eager 'to
see Beattie's College.' In the _Scots Magazine_ for February 1773 there
is mentioned a masked ball, attended by seventy persons of quality,
given in Edinburgh by Sir Alexander Macdonald and his wife, Miss
Bosville of Yorkshire, one of Boswell's loves. Croker says that the
masquerade for which he was rallied by Johnson was given by the Dowager
Countess of Fife, and that Bozzy went as a dumb conjurer; but from the
expression of the _Magazine_, 'an entertainment little known in this
part of the Kingdom,' coupled with the words employed by Johnson, there
can be no doubt that Croker is wrong, and that the host on this occasion
was the churlish chief, whose inhospitable ways they were to experience
in Skye. He was now near the great honour of his life, admission to that
Literary Club, of which, said Sir William Jones, 'I will only say that
there is no branch of human knowledge on which some of our members are
not capable of giving information.' Never was honour better deserved or
better repaid. Without his record the fame of that club would have
passed away, surviving at best in some sort of hazy companionship with
the Kit-Cat, Button's, Will's, and other clubs and assemblies. Never was
there a club of which each member was better qualified to take care of
his own fame with posterity. None of Johnson's associates would have
hesitated in declaring an extended date of renown for the _Rambler_; and
perhaps he himself would have staked the reputation assured, as Cowper
said, by the tears of bards and heroes in order to immortalize the dead,
on his _Rasselas_ or t