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 place in the priesthood. Physically timorous, he has no use for the army, except as the convivialities of the officers' mess entice.

What the young Boswell is really yearning for is the new poetry, the new plays, the new histories, the new skeptical philosophy, hot from the capital; and, as soon as possible, he must be down there in London among the producers of the new age, which his prescient nostrils have scented afar off. His father, almost heartbroken, sees this restlessness, but has outlived his sympathy with it. He talks to James as if he were a silly, stubborn boy—even after James is a man grown and married, he always is made to feel like a "timid boy" in the presence of his father, except when deep drafts of strong beer have stupefied his sensibilities to the paternal snibbing. He reveres his father and would, if given a chance, love him. But his father sheds a black frost on his affection, and seeks to destroy the form which the spirit of his son's young life spontaneously takes. As an incidental consequence, perhaps, of this repressive discipline, when James at the age of twenty-two makes his arrangements to go abroad, ostensibly to study law in Utrecht, he is obliged to set aside £10 of his traveling allowance for the upkeep of the illegitimate child which he leaves behind him.

By heredity and by poetical sentiment and by association with Johnson, Boswell is a Tory, but by a deeper impulse in him he takes to radicalism and revolution like a duck to water. He has in Holland an interesting affair with a young lady of excellent birth, whose skepticism in religious and moral matters shocks him, superficially; but to whom does he run for consultation on the case but to the author of "The Nou-