alive, as a shameless political sharper, a
domestic bashaw, and an intolerable tyrant over his tenants.' Penrith
and Whitehaven were in fear when he walked their streets; he defied his
creditors; and the father of the poet Wordsworth died without being able
to enforce his claims. The author of the _Rolliad_ describes his power
as

'Even by the elements confessed,
Of mines and boroughs Lonsdale stands possessed;
And one sad servitude alike denotes
The slave that labours and the slave that votes.'

It was on this political boroughmonger and jobber that Boswell was now
pinning his faith. The complete dependence of him on Lonsdale in return
for the Recordership of Carlisle did not escape the notice of the wits,
who now found that the writer who had been declaring over the India Bill
of Fox his devotion to the throne, the Tory, but no slave, had
transferred his entire loyalty and abjectest protestations to 'his king
in Westmoreland.' To add to his distress, his wife was dying. A short
trial of London had led her to return to Ayrshire, and her husband was
lost in doubt whether to revisit her or cling to 'the great sphere of
England,' the whirl of the metropolis, in hopes that the great prize
would at last be drawn. In the north he found her still lingering on,
but in his eagerness to obtain political influence 'I drank so freely
that riding home in the dark I fell from my horse and bruised my
shoulder.' From London he was again summoned, but with his curious
infelicity at such times of trouble, he was not in time to witness her
death: 'not till my second daughter came running out from the house and
announced to us the dismal event in a burst of tears.' Remorse found
vent in an agony of grief. 'She never would have left me,' he cries to
Temple; 'this reflection will pursue me to my grave.' In July, the
widower of a month hastened north to contest the county, only to find
Sir Adam Fergusson chosen. 'Let me never impiously repine,' is his cry
of distress. 'Yet as "Jesus wept" for the death of Lazarus, I hope my
tears at this time are excused. The woeful circumstance of such a state
of mind is that it rejects consolation; it feels an indulgence in its
own wretchedness.' His hustings appearances would appear to have been at
least marked by fluency, for Burns, his junior by eighteen years,
declares his own inability to fight like Montgomerie or 'gab like
Boswell.'

As he draws to a close, the letter