t reed was to break. At
Lowther Castle, his wig was removed from his room, as a practical joke
of a coarse order on the unoffending Boswell, and all the day he was
obliged to go in his nightcap, which he felt was very ill-timed to one
in his situation. The loss of the wig the unsuspecting victim declares
will remain as great a secret as the writer of the letters of Junius,
but ere long the tyrant whom he had invoked as the man of Macedonia to
help Scotland has undeceived him. 'I suppose you thought,' he roughly
said, 'I was to bring you into Parliament? I never had any such
intention.' It is impossible not to feel for Boswell at this crisis. 'I
am down at an inn,' he writes to Temple, 'and ashamed and sunk on
account of the disappointment of hopes which led me to endure such
grievances. I deserve all that I suffer. I am at the same time
distracted what to do in my own county. I am quite in a fever. O my old
and most intimate friend, I intreat you to afford me some consolation,
and pray do not divulge my mortification. I now resign my Recordership,
and shall get rid of all connection with this brutal fellow.' His last
Parliamentary venture was cut short by the reflection how small was his
following. How curiously after all this reads his own little
autobiographical sketch in the _European Magazine_! 'It was generally
supposed that Mr Boswell would have had a seat in Parliament; and indeed
his not being amongst the Representatives of the Commons is one of those
strange things which occasionally happen in the complex operations of
our mixed Government. That he has not been _brought into Parliament_ by
some great man is not to be wondered at when we peruse his publick
declaration.' Not to be wondered at, truly, though the writer chose to
refer the wonder to his independence. Then the reader is informed how he
had been a candidate at the general election for his own county of Ayr,
'where he has a very extensive property and a very fine place of which
there is a view and description in Grose's _Antiquities of Scotland_.'
The conclusion of the sketch relates how, at the last Lord Mayor's day,
he sang with great applause a state-ballad of his own composition,
entitled _The Grocer of London_. This was the last shot in the political
locker. At a Guildhall dinner, given to Pitt by the worshipful company
of grocers, Boswell contrived to get himself called upon for a song. He
rose, and delivered himself of a catch on the model of Dibd