ith Reynolds, and on July 2 Boswell left London, to see
Johnson no more. Johnson died on the 13th of December 1784.

Fitful and unsuccessful legal and political ambitions occupied a large
part of Boswell's later years. He made some approaches to standing as
a candidate for Ayrshire in 1784, {86} and again in 1788, was called to
the English Bar in 1786, attached himself to Lord Lonsdale, and hoped
to enter Parliament for one of his boroughs, but seems to have got
nothing out of his connection with that insolent old bully but a
certain amount of humiliation and the Recordership of Carlisle. That
unimportant office was the only substantial reward he received from all
his long suit and service in the antechambers of law and politics.
Whatever he achieved he owed to literature and the friends his love of
literature had brought him. It was not the laird or the lawyer, but
the friend and biographer of Johnson whom the Royal Academy appointed
in 1791 to the complimentary office of their Secretary for Foreign
Correspondence. And those last years, while they brought him
disappointment in everything else, saw him take definite rank as a
successful author. The _Tour to the Hebrides_ was published in 1785,
and sold out in a few weeks. The third edition was issued within a
year of the appearance of the first. It was followed by the
publication of Johnson's famous Letter to Lord Chesterfield and of an
account of his Conversation with George III, and finally in 1791 by the
_Life_ itself. A second edition of this was called for in 1793.
Boswell only lived two years more. He died on May 19, 1795. He left
two sons, Alexander, {87} who became Sir Alexander, was the principal
mover in the matter of the Burns Monument on the banks of Doon, and was
killed in a duel in 1822; and James, who supplied notes for the third
edition of his father's great book, and edited the third _Variorum
Shakespeare_, known as Boswell's _Malone_, in 1821.

Such were the main outlines of the life of the biographer. We may now
turn to those of the life which he owes his fame to recording. They
are in most ways very unlike his own. Samuel Johnson was very far from
being heir to a large estate and an ancient name. He was the son of a
bookseller at Lichfield, and was born there on the 18th of September
1709, in a house which is now preserved in public hands in memory of
the event of that day. His father's family was so obscure that he once
said, "I can