e of Scotland,' he has been made to pay severely by systematic
castigation from his rival, who now doggedly, as Johnson would have
said, set himself to the work before him. Wherever first-hand
information could be had, he was constantly on the track. Miss Burney
has told how she met him at the gate of the choir of St George's chapel
at Windsor--'his comic-serious face having lost none of its wonted
singularity, nor yet his mind and language.' She had letters from
Johnson, and he must have some of the doctor's choice little notes: 'We
have seen him long enough upon stilts, I want to shew him in a new
light. He proposed a thousand curious expedients to get them, but I was
invincible.' The approach of the king and queen broke off the interview,
but next morning he was again on the watch. We must regret that they
were not given, however much his indiscretions had made people chary of
their confidences. 'Jemmy Boswell,' writes Lord Eldon, 'called upon me,
desiring to know my definition of taste. I told him I must decline
defining it, because I knew he would publish it.' To secure first-hand,
sifted, and 'authentick' material this man, so long decried by sciolists
as merely a fool with a note-book, would forego every rebuff or refusal.
'Boswell,' says Horace Walpole, 'that quintessence of busy-bodies called
on me last week, and was let in when he should not have been. After
tapping many topics, to which I made as dry answers as an unbribed
oracle, he vented his errand; 'had I seen Dr Johnson's _Lives of the
Poets_?'

During the progress of the _Life_ he turned aside to his last literary
vagary--_No Abolition of Slavery; or the Universal Empire of Love_,
1791. This long-lost brochure has this year been rediscovered, but it
will add little interest to his life, as its main tenets had long been
known. A writer in the _Athenaeum_ for May 9th describes it as quarto in
form, and dedicated to Miss B----, whom he identifies with Miss Bagnal
to be shortly mentioned. On the three topics of slavery, the Middlesex
election, and America, Bozzy differed respectfully but firmly from the
doctor, who drank at Oxford to the next insurrection of the negroes in
the West Indies. Accordingly he stands stoutly by the planters and the
feudal scheme of subordination, whose annihilation he maintains would
'shut the gates of mercy on mankind.' For his apparent inconsistency
Burke is attacked:--

'Burke, art thou here, too? thou whose pen
Can