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 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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