d until the spring of
1786. The diary of Pepys was not then known to the public, and Boswell's
indiscretions as to the emotions aroused in him by the neat ladies'
maids at Inveraray, and the extremity of drunkenness which he exhibited
at Corrichatachin, created a literary sensation and sent the _Tour_
through three editions in one year. In the meantime his pecuniary and
other difficulties at home were great; he made hardly more than L100 a
year by his profession, and his relations with his father were
chronically strained. In 1775 he began to keep terms at the Inner Temple
and managed to see a good deal of Johnson, between whom and John Wilkes
he succeeded in bringing about a meeting at the famous dinner at Dilly's
on the 15th of May 1776. On the 30th of August 1782 his father died,
leaving him an estate worth L1600 a year. On the 30th of June 1784,
Boswell met Johnson for the last time at a dinner at Sir Joshua
Reynolds's. He accompanied him back in the coach from Leicester Square
to Bolt Court. "We bade adieu to each other affectionately in the
carriage. When he had got down upon the foot pavement he called out
'Fare you well'; and without looking back, sprung away with a kind of
pathetic briskness, if I may use that expression, which seemed to
indicate a struggle to conceal uneasiness, and impressed me with a
foreboding of our long, long separation." Johnson died that year, and
two years later the Boswells moved to London. In 1789 Mrs Boswell died,
leaving five children. She had been an excellent mother and a good wife,
despite the infidelities and drunkenness of her husband, and from her
death Boswell relapsed into worse excesses, grievously aggravated by
hypochondria. He died of a complication of disorders at his house in
Great Poland Street on the 19th of May 1795, and was buried a fortnight
later at Auchinleck.

Up to the eve of his last illness Boswell had been busy upon his magnum
opus, _The Life of Samuel Johnson_, which was in process of
crystallization to the last. The first edition was published in two
quarto volumes in an edition of 1700 copies on the 16th of May 1791. He
was preparing a third edition when he died; this was completed by his
friend Edmund Malone, who brought out a fifth edition in 1807. That of
James Boswell junior (the editor of Malone's _Variorum Shakespeare_,
1821) appeared in 1811.

The _Life of Johnson_ was written on a scale practically unknown to
biographers before Boswell. It is a