Pray read the new Account of Corsica.[1] What relates to Paoli will amuse you much.  There is a deal about the island and its divisions that one does not care a straw for.  The author, Boswell, is a strange being, and, like Cambridge, has a rage of knowing anybody that ever was talked of.  He forced himself upon me at Paris in spite of my teeth and my doors, and I see has given a foolish account of all he could pick up from me about King Theodore.[2] He then took an antipathy to me on Rousseau’s account, abused me in the newspapers, and exhorted Rousseau to do so too:  but as he came to see me no more, I forgave all the rest.  I see he now is a little sick of Rousseau himself; but I hope it will not cure him of his anger to me.  However, his book will I am sure entertain you.

[Footnote 1:  Boswell, Dr. Johnson’s celebrated biographer, had taken great interest in the affairs of Corsica, which, in this year (1768), Choiseul, the Prime Minister of France, had bought of Genoa, to which State it had long belonged.  Paoli was a Corsican noble, who had roused his countrymen to throw off the domination of Genoa; and, on the arrival of French troops to take possession of their purchase, he made a vigorous resistance to the French General, the Comte de Marboeuf; but eventually he was overpowered, and forced to fly.  He took refuge in England, where George III. granted him a pension, which he enjoyed till his death in 1807, when he was buried in Westminster Abbey.  One of his relations was M. Charles Buonaparte, the father of Napoleon, who was only prevented from accompanying him in his abandonment of Corsica by the persuasion of his uncle, the Archdeacon of Ajaccio.  Boswell, who was apt to be enthusiastic in his hero-worship and anxiety for new acquaintances (whom, it must be admitted, he commonly chose with judgement, if with little dignity), introduced him to Johnson, who also conceived a high regard for him, and on one occasion remarked that “he had the loftiest port of any man he had ever seen.”]

[Footnote 2:  After several outbreaks within a few years, the Corsicans in 1736 embarked in a revolt so formal and complete that they altogether threw off their allegiance to Genoa, and chose as their king Theodore Neuhof, a Westphalian baron.  But Cardinal Fleury, the French Prime Minister, from a belief that Theodore was an instrument of Walpole, lent the Genoese a force of three thousand men, which at last succeeded in crushing the insurrection and expelling Theodore. (See the Editor’s “France under the Bourbons,” iii. 157.) Theodore is one of the six ex-kings whom, in Voltaire’s “Candide,” his hero met at a hotel in Venice during the carnival, when he gave a melancholy account of his reverse of fortune.  “He had been called ‘Your Majesty;’ now he can hardly find any one to call him ‘Sir.’  He had coined money; now he has not a penny of his own.  He had had two Secretaries of State; now he has but one valet.  He had sat on a throne; but since that time he had laid on straw in a London prison.”  In fact, his state was so doleful, that the other ex-kings subscribed twenty sequins apiece to buy him some coats and shirts ("Candide,” c. 26).]