'of a variable judgment and
irregular inclinations. For my part, without affecting to be a Socrates,
I am sure I have a more than ordinary struggle to maintain with the Evil
Principle, and all the methods I can devise are little enough to keep me
tolerably steady in the paths of rectitude.' Could the doctor have read
even the published correspondence he would have been at no loss for a
detailed commentary on this defence.

And coming events now cast their shadow before. That curious feature of
Boswell's character, the mixture of religious sentiments and the Sterne
vein of pietistic moralizing united with laxity in practice, appears
strangely enough in the letter to Temple, dated in the February of 1767,
and sent to his friend who had just been ordained to the living of
Mamhead in Devon. 'I view,' he writes, 'the profession of a clergyman in
an amiable and respectable light. Don't be moved by declamations against
ecclesiastical history, as if that could blacken the sacred order.' He
admits that ecclesiastical history is not the best field for the display
of the virtues in that profession, but we are to judge of the thousands
of worthy divines who have been a blessing to their parishes. He exhorts
his friend to labour cheerfully in the vineyard and to leave not a tare
in Mamhead. In Edinburgh it appears there were specimens; for after this
pious homily he confesses quietly his own _liaison_ with 'a dear
infidel' of a married woman. But the love affairs of Boswell, one of the
most curious and 'characteristical' (as he would himself have phrased
it) episodes in his life we shall discuss in a connected form in the
next chapter, in order to secure clearness of treatment and
concentration of detail.

We turn, then, to his career at the bar. There can be no shadow of a
doubt that with proper industry, backed as he was with very strong
social and family connections, he would have secured a lucrative
professional practice. In February of 1767 he is 'coming into great
employment; I have this winter made sixty-five guineas, which is a
considerable sum for a young man,' and the _Boswelliana_ shew him in
easy intercourse with the best society in the Scottish capital.
Belonging as he did to the hereditary _noblesse de la robe_, as Lockhart
calls it, he was not likely, with but moderate attention, to have stood
like Scott, 'an hour by the Tron, wi' deil ane to speir his price,'--Sir
Walter's fee book shews for the first year a return