BOSWELL.

[145] See ante, i. 437, and post, p. 72.

[146]

     ’What is’t to us, if taxes rise or fall,
      Thanks to our fortune we pay none at all.

      No statesman e’er will find it worth his pains
      To tax our labours and excise our brains. 
      Burthens like these vile earthly buildings bear,
      No tribute’s laid on Castles in the Air’

Churchill’s Poems, Night, ed. 1766, i. 89.

[147] Pitt, in 1784, laid a tax of ten shillings a year on every horse ’kept for the saddle, or to be put in carriages used solely for pleasure.’Parl.  Hist. xxiv. 1028.

[148] In 1763 he published the following description of himself in his Correspondence with Erskine, ed. 1879, p.36.  ’The author of the Ode to Tragedy is a most excellent man; he is of an ancient family in the west of Scotland, upon which he values himself not a little.  At his nativity there appeared omens of his future greatness.  His parts are bright; and his education has been good.  He has travelled in post-chaises miles without number.  He is fond of seeing much of the world.  He eats of every good dish, especially apple-pie.  He drinks old hock.  He has a very fine temper.  He is somewhat of an humorist, and a little tinctured with pride.  He has a good manly countenance, and he owns himself to be amorous.  He has infinite vivacity, yet is observed at times to have a melancholy cast.  He is rather fat than lean, rather short than tall, rather young than old.’  He is oddly enough described in Arighi’s Histoire de Pascal Paoli, i. 231, ’En traversant la Mediterranee sur de freles navires pour venir s’asseoir au foyer de la nationalite Corse, des hommes graves tels que Boswel et Volney obeissaient sans doute a un sentiment bien plus eleve qu’au besoin vulgaire d’une puerile curiosite’

[149] See ante, i. 400.

[150] For respectable, see ante, iii. 241, note 2.

[151] Boswell, in the last of his Hypochondriacks, says:—­’I perceive that my essays are not so lively as I expected they would be, but they are more learned.  And I beg I may not be charged with excessive arrogance when I venture to say that they contain a considerable portion of original thinking.’London Mag. 1783, p. 124.

[152] Burns, in The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer, says:—­

     ’But could I like Montgomeries fight,
      Or gab like Boswell.’

Boswell and Burns were born within a few miles of each other, Boswell being the elder by eighteen years.

[153]
     ’For pointed satire I would Buckhurst choose,
      The best good man, with the worst-natured muse.’

Rochester’s Imitations of Horace, Sat. i. 10.