een 1758 and 1795, not without a view to publication, but
were lost for more than fifty years. At Boulogne in 1850 Major Stone, of
the East India Company, had the fortunate curiosity to examine a scrap
of paper in which was wrapped some small purchase; it turned out to be a
letter signed by James Boswell, and was traced to the store of an
itinerant paper-vendor, where the letters published in 1856 were
discovered. The anonymous editor of this issue is conjectured--with good
reason, as we think--by Mr. Seccombe, who introduces the volume, to have
been a Philip Francis of the Middle Temple who became later Sir Philip
of the Supreme Consular Court of the Levant; but this matter also is
obscure. The strangest mystery of all, however, is that these
interesting, entertaining, in fact delightful letters, though on their
first appearance they created a mild literary sensation, till last
December had never been reprinted.

The volume before us is a reprint from the first edition, the
introduction by Mr. Seccombe being substituted for that of the original
editor. We wish that Mr. Seccombe had been less modest--less
conservative at any rate. With his view that "the editing was admirably
done" we cannot agree entirely. Francis, who has intercalated blocks of
exegesis and comment between the letters, writes good, straightforward
prose, and appears to have been a good, sensible sort of man. He has
enlivened his editorial labours with irruptions of legal facetiousness
and sagacious reflections. He admires Carlyle. But his lack of subtlety
and his prodigious good sense make him incapable of appreciating the
character of Boswell. Passages in the letters which seemed to him
ridiculous he, in his solicitude for the reader's enjoyment, has been
careful to print in italics; for it is difficult to suppose that Boswell
underlined them himself. The originals are again lost; should the
passages in question really be underlined, it would follow that Boswell
was not unintentionally or unconsciously ridiculous; that all his life
he practised an elaborate mystification; that he succeeded in
hoodwinking the world; that he enlightened Temple alone, who
nevertheless appears to have treated him as though he were what the
world took him for; and that Francis, who saw these underlined
manuscripts, and yet persisted in the conventional view of Boswell, was
not a Mid-Victorian prig but a common imbecile. It is true that he has
been stupid enough to mangle