the British fleet.'

How admirable is the style of all this, equal quite to Goldsmith's best
and lightest touch! Exquisite, too, is that picture of Bozzy, as the
rollicking British stage-tar of tradition, in his rendering of Garrick's
song, the gems from the Opera and the national melodies. Allan Ramsay's
song in Corsica is to be equalled only by Goldsmith on _his_ tour when
he played, but not for amusement, _Barbara Allan_ and _Johnny
Armstrong's Good Night_ before the doors of Italian convents and Flemish
homesteads.

But the highstrung Bozzy had to experience a revulsion of low feelings
to which he was ever prone. He is soon in a sort of Byronic fit, and he
continues in a strain with which we should have not credited the 'gay
classic friend of Jack Wilkes' and of that Sienese _signora_, unless he
had turned evidence against himself. He declared his feelings to Paoli,
as he had done to Johnson, whose curt advice had been not to confuse or
resolve the common consequences of irregularity into an unalterable
decree of destiny. To the general he now attributed his feeling of the
vanity of life, the exhaustion in the very heat of youth of all the
sweets of being, and the incapacity for taking part in active life to
his 'metaphysical researches,' his reasoning beyond his depth on such
subjects as it is not given to man to know. These hesitances the other
wisely pushed aside with the soldierly advice to strengthen his mind by
the perusal of Livy and Plutarch. In return Bozzy gave an imitation of
'my revered friend Mr Samuel Johnson,' little dreaming that all three
would one day be intimate in London, and the general's house in Portman
Square be always at the traveller's disposal. From the palace, as he
styles it, of Paoli, Nov. 1765 he wrote to Johnson, as he had done
before, 'from a kind of superstition agreeable to him as to myself,'
from what he calls _loca solennia_--places of solemn interest. 'I dare
to call this a spirited tour. I dare to challenge your approbation;'
and, reading it twenty years later in the original which the old man
had preserved, he found it full of 'generous enthusiasm.' No account of
the continental travels of Boswell would be complete without the
reproduction of his letter to the doctor from Wittenberg. It is one of
the most important for the more subtle shades of psychology in the
writer's character.

'_Sunday, Sept. 30, 1764._

MY EVER DEAR AND MUCH RESPECTED SIR,--You know my so