There is nothing, however, which Boswell seems to have enjoyed more heartily than his own good impulses.  He looks upon his virtuous resolution with a sort of aesthetic satisfaction, and with the glow of a virtuous man contemplating a promising penitent.  Whilst suffering severely from the consequences of imprudent conduct, he gets a letter of virtuous advice from his friend Temple.  He instantly sees himself reformed for the rest of his days.  “My warm imagination,” he says, “looks forward with great complacency on the sobriety, the healthfulness, and worth of my future life.”  “Every instance of our doing those things which we ought not to have done, and leaving undone those things which we ought to have done, is attended,” as he elsewhere sagely observes, “with more or less of what is truly remorse;” but he seems rather to have enjoyed even the remorse.  It is needless to say that the complacency was its own reward, and that the resolution vanished like other more eccentric impulses.  Music, he once told Johnson, affected him intensely, producing in his mind “alternate sensations of pathetic dejection, so that I was ready to shed tears, and of daring resolution so that I was inclined to rush into the thickest of the [purely hypothetical] battle.”  “Sir,” replied Johnson, “I should never hear it, if it made me such a fool.”  Elsewhere he expresses a wish to “fly to the woods,” or retire into a desert, a disposition which Johnson checked by one of his habitual gibes at the quantity of easily accessible desert in Scotland.  Boswell is equally frank in describing himself in situations more provocative of contempt than even drunkenness in a drawing-room.  He tells us how dreadfully frightened he was by a storm at sea in the Hebrides, and how one of his companions, “with a happy readiness,” made him lay hold of a rope fastened to the masthead, and told him to pull it when he was ordered.  Boswell was thus kept quiet in mind and harmless in body.

This extreme simplicity of character makes poor Boswell loveable in his way.  If he sought notoriety, he did not so far mistake his powers as to set up for independent notoriety.[1] He was content to shine in reflected light:  and the affectations with which he is charged seem to have been unconscious imitations of his great idol.  Miss Burney traced some likeness even in his dress.  In the later part of the Life we meet phrases in which Boswell is evidently aping the true Johnsonian style.  So, for example, when somebody distinguishes between “moral” and “physical necessity;” Boswell exclaims, “Alas, sir, they come both to the same thing.  You may be as hard bound by chains when covered by leather, as when the iron appears.”  But he specially emulates the profound melancholy of his hero.  He seems to have taken pride in his sufferings from hypochondria; though, in truth, his melancholy diverges from Johnson’s by as great a difference as that which divides any two varieties in Jaques’s classification.  Boswell’s