The years 1768 and 1769 were a period of great excitement for Boswell.  He was carrying on various love affairs, which ended with his marriage in the end of 1769.  He was publishing his book upon Corsica and paying homage to Paoli, who arrived in England in the autumn of the same year.  The book appeared in the beginning of 1768, and he begs his friend Temple to report all that is said about it, but with the restriction that he is to conceal all censure.  He particularly wanted Gray’s opinion, as Gray was a friend of Temple’s.  Gray’s opinion, not conveyed to Boswell, was expressed by his calling it “a dialogue between a green goose and a hero.”  Boswell, who was cultivating the society of various eminent people, exclaims triumphantly in a letter to Temple (April 26, 1768), “I am really the great man now.”  Johnson and Hume had called upon him on the same day, and Garrick, Franklin, and Oglethorpe also partook of his “admirable dinners and good claret.”  “This,” he says, with the sense that he deserved his honours, “is enjoying the fruit of my labours, and appearing like the friend of Paoli.”  Johnson in vain expressed a wish that he would “empty his head of Corsica, which had filled it too long.”  “Empty my head of Corsica!  Empty it of honour, empty it of friendship, empty it of piety!” exclaims the ardent youth.  The next year accordingly saw Boswell’s appearance at the Stratford Jubilee, where he paraded to the admiration of all beholders in a costume described by himself (apparently) in a glowing article in the London Magazine.  “Is it wrong, sir,” he took speedy opportunity of inquiring from the oracle, “to affect singularity in order to make people stare?” “Yes,” replied Johnson, “if you do it by propagating error, and indeed it is wrong in any way.  There is in human nature a general inclination to make people stare, and every wise man has himself to cure of it, and does cure himself.  If you wish to make people stare by doing better than others, why make them stare till they stare their eyes out.  But consider how easy it is to make people stare by being absurd”—­a proposition which he proceeds to illustrate by examples perhaps less telling than Boswell’s recent performance.

The sage was less communicative on the question of marriage, though Boswell had anticipated some “instructive conversation” upon that topic.  His sole remark was one from which Boswell “humbly differed.”  Johnson maintained that a wife was not the worse for being learned.  Boswell, on the other hand, defined the proper degree of intelligence to be desired in a female companion by some verses in which Sir Thomas Overbury says that a wife should have some knowledge, and be “by nature wise, not learned much by art.”  Johnson said afterwards that Mrs. Boswell was in a proper degree inferior to her husband.  So far as we can tell, she seems to have been a really sensible, and good woman, who kept her husband’s absurdities in check, and was, in her way, a better wife than he deserved.  So, happily, are most wives.