engaged in these alarums and excursions or in reproving
Boswell for giving the coachman a shilling instead of the customary
sixpence, he was occupied in reading Pomponius Mela _De Situ Orbis_.
How complete the picture is and how vivid! It once more gives
Boswell's method in miniature.

He seems to have stayed at Utrecht about a year, afterwards travelling
in Germany, where he visited Wittenberg, and sat down to write to
Johnson in the church where the Reformation was first preached, with
his paper resting on the tomb of Melanchthon. It is noticeable that,
though he had only known Johnson a year, he already hoped to be his
biographer. "At this tomb, then, my ever dear and respected friend, I
vow to thee an eternal attachment. It shall be my study to do what I
can to render your life happy: and, if you die before me, I shall
endeavour to do honour to your memory." He was also at this time in
Italy and Switzerland, where he visited Voltaire and gratified him by
quoting a remark of Johnson's that Frederick the Great's writings were
the sort of stuff one might expect from "a footboy who had been
Voltaire's amanuensis." Nor did this {77} collector of celebrities
omit to visit Rousseau, the rival lion of the day, between whom and
Voltaire the orthodox Johnson thought it was "difficult to settle the
proportion of iniquity." But as far as Boswell's records go, he never
said such violent things of Voltaire as of Rousseau, whom he called "a
rascal who ought to be hunted out of society and transported to work in
the plantations." Boswell, however, was an admirer of the _Vicaire
Savoyard_, and said what he could in defence of his host, in return for
the hospitality he had enjoyed at Neuchatel, with the usual result, of
course, that Johnson only became more outrageous.

In 1765 Boswell made the acquaintance of another distinguished man with
whom his name will always be connected. Corsica had at that time been
long, and on the whole victoriously, engaged in a struggle to free
itself from the hated rule of Genoa. The leader of the Corsicans was a
man of high birth, character and abilities, Pascal Paoli, who had acted
since 1753 at once as their General and as the head of the civil
administration. Both the generous and the curious element in Boswell
made him anxious not to return from Italy without seeing something of
so interesting a people and so great a hero. Armed with introductions
from Rousseau {78} and others and wi