ten them all. He was, if we are to
give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who
knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described
him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not
having been alive when "The Dunciad" was written. Beauclerk used his
name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of
the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater
part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some
eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was
always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a
crown unto him," not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited
himself at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled
Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription
of "Corsican Boswell." In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that
at Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile
and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with
family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born
gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common
butt in the taverns of London; so curious to know everybody who was
talked about that, Tory and High Churchman as he was, he manoeuvred, we
have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine; so vain of the most
childish distinctions that, when he had been to Court, he drove to the
office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and
summoned all the printer's devils to admire his new ruffles and
sword,--such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be.
Everything which another man would have hidden, everything the
publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was
matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind.
What silly things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one
place he was troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how
at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the
prayer-book and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him, how he went
to see men hanged and came away maudlin, how he added five hundred
pounds to the fortune of one of his babies because she was not scared at
Johnson's ugly face, how he was frightened out of his wits at sea, and
how the sailors quieted him as they would have quieted a child, how
tipsy