Boswell had many literary projects and ambitions, and never intended to be known merely as the biographer of Johnson.  He proposed to write a life of Lord Kames and to compose memoirs of Hume.  It seems he did write a life of Sir Robert Sibbald.  He had other plans in his head, but dissipation and a steadily increasing drunkenness destroyed them all.  As inveterate book-hunter, I confess to a great fancy to lay hands on his Dorando:  A Spanish Tale, a shilling book published in Edinburgh during the progress of the once famous Douglas case, and ordered to be suppressed as contempt of court after it had been through three editions.  It is said, probably hastily, that no copy is known to exist—­a dreary fate which, according to Lord Macaulay, might have attended upon the Life of Johnson had the copyright of that work become the property of Boswell’s son, who hated to hear it mentioned.  It is not, however, very easy to get rid of any book once it is published, and I do not despair of reading Dorando before I die.

OLD PLEASURE GARDENS[A]

 [Footnote A:  Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century, by Warwick
 Wroth, F.S.A., assisted by Arthur Edgar Wroth.  London:  Macmillan and
 Co.]

This is an honest book, disfigured by no fine writing or woeful attempts to make us dance round may-poles with our ancestors.  Terribly is our good language abused by the swell-mob of stylists, for whom it is certainly not enough that Chatham’s language is their mother’s tongue.  May the Devil fly away with these artists; though no sooner had he done so than we should be ‘wae’ for auld Nicky-ben.  Mr. Wroth, of the British Museum, and his brother, Mr. Arthur Wroth, are above such vulgar pranks, and never strain after the picturesque, but in the plain garb of honest men carry us about to the sixty-four gardens where the eighteenth-century Londoner, his wife and family—­the John Gilpins of the day—­might take their pleasure either sadly, as indeed best befits our pilgrim state, or uproariously to deaden the ear to the still small voice of conscience—­the pangs of slighted love, the law’s delay, the sluggish step of Fortune, the stealthy strides of approaching poverty, or any other of the familiar incidents of our mortal life.  The sixty-two illustrations which adorn the book are as honest as the letterpress.  There is a most delightful Morland depicting a very stout family indeed regaling itself sub tegmine fagi.  It is called a ‘Tea Party.’  A voluminous mother holds in her roomy lap a very fat baby, whose back and neck are full upon you as you stare into the picture.  And what a jolly back and innocent neck it is!  Enough to make every right-minded woman cry out with pleasure.  Then there is the highly respectable father stirring his cup and watching with placid content a gentleman in lace and ruffles attending to the wife, whilst the two elder children play with a wheezy dog.