velle Héloise"! He carries messages from Rousseau to Paoli, the Corsican patriot. He makes a sensation at the age of twenty-seven by his "Account of Corsica," containing the spirited journal of his association with Paoli, which first interpreted him to the English world. He would like to effect a meeting between Rousseau and Voltaire. Failing at that, he assists at the junction of Rousseau and Hume; and he pilots Rousseau's mistress across the Channel. He has an affair with a lady in Sienna, which pleases him for years. He courts in italy the insolent democrat John Wilkes; and later, as a masterpiece of mediation, he maneuvers Dr. Johnson himself into a meeting with Wilkes at a dinner party with the bookseller Dilly. He sides with the Americans against Dr. Johnson. He pretends to side with Burke against the French; but Burke's continually raging against the French bores him to extinction, and he is grateful and happy when the great man refrains from the subject for an entire evening.
The fact is that Boswell, in the prime of life, hasn't a political conviction in his body for which he would shed his blood, nor a moral principle which he isn't ready to sacrifice at a moment's notice for an enlargement of his experience—unless, indeed, we recognize as a conviction his impresario's passion for bringing great artists together; and as a principle, his desire "to be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy."
Every vital impulse in him is an expansive impulse; and it is his misfortune, when he is in "good society," to live in an "epoch of concentration." His presence in the sturdy classical circle of Burke, Johnson and Reynolds is, in a sense, an accident. He paints the temple of Georgian classicism because it is quite the
