in's 'Little
cherub that sits up aloft,' prefaced and interlarded by an address to
the guest of the evening. Honoured as he had been on his continental
tour at the courts of Europe, yet never till to-night had he felt
himself so flattered as now he was, in the presence of the minister he
admired, and to whose home and foreign policy he gave a hearty, if
discriminating support. Boswell for his song was encored six times, till
the cold features of the minister were seen to relax in a smile, amid
the general roar of plaudits and laughter! After this 'state ballad,' a
copy of which was last seen at Lord Houghton's sale, Bozzy and a
friend, in a state of high glee, returned to their lodgings, shouting
all the way _The Grocer of London_! 'He has declared,' adds the
complacent autobiographer, 'his resolution to persevere on the next
vacancy.'

All this time his great work was slowly advancing. At the end of the
_Journal_ had appeared a notice: 'preparing for the Press, in one volume
quarto, the _Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D._, by James Boswell, Esq.' The
note proceeds to sketch the plan; the collecting of materials for more
than twenty years, his desire to erect to him a literary monument, the
interweaving of 'the most authentick accounts' that can be obtained from
those who knew him, etc. To his chagrin, Mrs Thrale's volume of
anecdotes had been out before him, and Sir John Hawkins had been
commissioned by the London booksellers to produce a _Life_, which had
duly appeared. Not even the unequivocal success and merits of the
_Journal_ could induce 'the trade' to take Boswell seriously. No one had
thought of him, any more than Gay would have been thought of as the
biographer of the circle to which he had been admitted. Percy, even Sir
William Scott, had been successively approached, but none had given a
consideration to 'Johnson's Bozzy.' Such neglect, however, must have
spurred him to exertion. The lively lady's anecdotage, dateless and
confused, he could afford to despise as 'too void of method even for
such a farrago,' as Horace Walpole said of it. But the solemn Hawkins,
as an old friend and executor of Johnson's will, was a more dangerous
rival. 'Observe how he talks of me,' cries Boswell querulously, 'as
quite unknown.' No doubt Sir John was 'unclubable,' and by Reynolds,
Dyer, Percy, and Malone he was detested. Yet his book, though eclipsed
by Boswell's, is not unmeritorious; but for his allusion to 'Mr Boswell,
a nativ