from milk one fast-day, he did not reject it when put in his cup.  He notes the whistlings and puffings, the trick of saying “too-too-too” of his idol:  and it was a proud day when he won a bet by venturing to ask Johnson what he did with certain scraped bits of orange-peel.  His curiosity was not satisfied on this occasion; but it would have made him the prince of interviewers in these days.  Nothing delighted him so much as rubbing shoulders with any famous or notorious person.  He scraped acquaintance with Voltaire, Wesley, Rousseau, and Paoli, as well as with Mrs. Rudd, a forgotten heroine of the Newgate Calendar.  He was as eager to talk to Hume the sceptic, or Wilkes the demagogue, as to the orthodox Tory, Johnson; and, if repelled, it was from no deficiency in daring.  In 1767, he took advantage of his travels in Corsica to introduce himself to Lord Chatham, then Prime Minister.  The letter moderately ends by asking, “Could your lordship find time to honour me now and then with a letter? I have been told how favourably your lordship has spoken of me.  To correspond with a Paoli and with a Chatham is enough to keep a young man ever ardent in the pursuit of virtuous fame.”  No other young man of the day, we may be sure, would have dared to make such a proposal to the majestic orator.

His absurd vanity, and the greedy craving for notoriety at any cost, would have made Boswell the most offensive of mortals, had not his unfeigned good-humour disarmed enmity.  Nobody could help laughing, or be inclined to take offence at his harmless absurdities.  Burke said of him that he had so much good-humour naturally, that it was scarcely a virtue.  His vanity, in fact, did not generate affectation.  Most vain men are vain of qualities which they do not really possess, or possess in a lower degree than they fancy.  They are always acting a part, and become touchy from a half-conscious sense of the imposture.  But Boswell seems to have had few such illusions.  He thoroughly and unfeignedly enjoyed his own peculiarities, and thought his real self much too charming an object to be in need of any disguise.  No man, therefore, was ever less embarrassed by any regard for his own dignity.  He was as ready to join in a laugh at himself as in a laugh at his neighbours.  He reveals his own absurdities to the world at large as frankly as Pepys confided them to a journal in cypher.  He tells us how drunk he got one night in Skye, and how he cured his headache with brandy next morning; and what an intolerable fool he made of himself at an evening party in London after a dinner with the Duke of Montrose, and how Johnson in vain did his best to keep him quiet.  His motive for the concession is partly the wish to illustrate Johnson’s indulgence, and, in the last case, to introduce a copy of apologetic verses to the lady whose guest he had been.  He reveals other weaknesses with equal frankness.  One day, he says, “I owned to Johnson that I was occasionally troubled with a fit of narrowness.”  “Why, sir,” said he, “so am I. But I do not tell it.”  Boswell enjoys the joke far too heartily to act upon the advice.