38 Extracts from BosweWs Letters to Malone.
��The whole, &c. You will, probably, be able to assist me in ex pressing my idea, and arranging the parts. In the advertisement I intend to mention the letter to Lord Chesterfield, and perhaps the interview with the King, and the names of the correspondents in alphabetical order z . How should chronological order stand in the order of the members of my title? I had at first 'celebrated correspondents', which I don't like. How would it do to say ' his conversations and epistolary correspondence with eminent (or celebrated) persons ? ' Shall it be ' different works,' and ' various particulars ' ? In short, it is difficult to decide.
Courtenay was with me this morning. What a mystery is his going on at all ! Yet he looks well, talks well, dresses well, keeps his mare in short is in all respects like a parliament man. Do you know that my bad spirits are returned upon me to a certain degree ; and such is the sickly fondness for change of place, and imagination of relief, that I sometimes think you are happier by being in Dublin, than one is in this great metropolis, where hardly any man cares for another. I am persuaded I should relish your Irish dinners very much. I have at last got chambers in the Temple, in the very staircase where Johnson lived 2 ; and when my Magnum Opus is fairly launched, there shall I make a trial 3 .
��1 The advertisement is the pre face. In it he does not make this mention.
2 Letters, i. 90, n. 3.
3 Boswell wrote to Temple on April 6 : ' My Life of Johnson is at last drawing to a close. I am cor recting the last sheet, and have only to write an advertisement, to make out a note of Errata, and to correct a second sheet of Contents, one being done. I am at present in such bad spirits that I have every fear concerning it, that I may get no
��profit, nay, may lose, that the Public may be disappointed, and think that I have done it poorly, that I may make many enemies, and even have quarrels. Yet perhaps the very reverse of all this may hap pen.' Letters to Temple, p. 335.
On Aug. 22 he wrote : * My magnum opus sells wonderfully ; twelve hundred are now gone, and we hope the whole seventeen hundred may be gone before Christmas.' Ib. p. 342.
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