18. Hamlet, I.ii.140. In Greek mythology Hyperion was either the father of the sun or the sun itself. He was dethroned by Apollo.
19. For Boswell’s pre-1763 publications, see George Watson, ed., The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Vol. 2:1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), p. 1211.
20. For the sense of moral crisis in mid-century, see particularly John Brown’s celebrated An Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757), a publishing phenomenon which went through seven editions in two years, and also John Leland’s A View of the Principal Deistical Writers, 3 vols. (1754-6).
21. Life of Johnson, below, p. 135. Compare Boswell’s delightfully un-self-aware comments on Johnson’s early friendship with Savage, ‘a man, of whom it is difficult to speak impartially, without wondering that he was for some time the intimate companion of Johnson; for his character was marked by profligacy, insolence, and ingratitude’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 93).
22. Ibid., p. 918.
23. Michel de Montaigne, ‘De l’amitie’ (‘On affectionate relationships’), Essais, i.28, in (Euvres completes, eds. Albert Thibaudet and Maurice Rat, ‘Bibliotheque de la Pleiade’ (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), pp. 181–93; The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1987), pp. 205–19.
24. Life of Johnson, below, p. 247.
25. In respect of Johnson, consider Boswell’s concluding estimate of him: ‘He was afflicted with a bodily disease, which made him often restless and fretful; and with a constitutional melancholy, the clouds of which darkened the brightness of his fancy, and gave a gloomy cast to his whole course of thinking’ (Life of Johnson, below, p. 1004). Boswell himself of course was, in the words of David Daiches, ‘subject to periodic bouts of disabling melancholy’ (Clingham, ed., New Light on Boswell, p. 6). The correspondence which survives from the period of composition of the Life frequently alludes to Boswell’s labouring under ‘a sad mental cloud’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 256: cf. also pp. 216 and 219).
26. Boswell in Holland, 1763–1764, ed. Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw Hill, and London: Heinemann, 1952), pp. 140 and 196.
27. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 368.
28. Essays collected as Boswell’s Column, ed. Margery Bailey (London: William Kimber, 1951). Quotations on pp. 23 and 25, from ‘On Periodical Papers’, London Magazine, 1 November 1777.
29. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., pp. 77 and 28. The reference is to Plutarch’s Moralia.
30. Ibid., p. 196.
31. Ibid., p. 136.
32. Rambler, 24 (1750); Life of Johnson, below, p. 84 – cf. also Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 97.
33. Life of Johnson, below, p. 500.
34. Although note the conclusion of the letter Johnson wrote Boswell on 27 August 1775, with its touching quotation from Hamlet, III.ii. 73 (Life of Johnson, below, p. 465).
35. Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., pp. 35 and 55.
36. In July 1773, when Johnson had already known Boswell for over ten years; Piozzi, Anecdotes, pp. 31-2.
37. Tibullus, I.i.60; cf. Adventurer 58 (1753), where Johnson discusses the graceful reworking of this line by Ovid in his elegy on the death of Tibullus. For Johnson, this line of Tibullus was not just about companionship; as a site of repeated allusion, both by Johnson and by others, it itself nurtured and enacted a form of companionship. Life of Johnson, below, p. 992.
38. Ibid, p. 768, and Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 280.
39. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 552–61. See Sven Molin, ‘Boswell’s Account of the Johnson-Wilkes Meeting’, Studies in English Literature, 3 (1963), pp. 307–22; and, more recently, the sensitive account in Redford, Designing the Life, pp. 103–10.
40. Life of Johnson, below, p. 668. The ‘gentleman’ was in fact Boswell, as we know from his journal, and the suppression of the fact in the text of the Life is an interesting example of how Boswell’s personal vanity could come into conflict with his literary ambition to make the work as full and detailed as possible. In 1786, however, Boswell could be candid in a letter to Malone that his practice with Johnson was sometimes to ‘[tease] him long, to bring out all I could’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 114).
41. ‘Peter Pindar’ (i.e. John Wolcot) published in 1786 A Poetical and Congratulatory Epistle to James Boswell which however reported Johnson’s indignation and incredulity at the idea that Boswell might be his biographer: ‘Boswell write my life! why the fellow possesses not abilities for writing the life of an ephemeron’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 112, n. 4).
42. Life of Johnson, below, p. 731.
43. Ibid., p. 633.
44. When compiling the Life Boswell was advised by correspondents such as Anna Seward that he should not pass over in silence subjects where Johnson may have been in error: ‘The genuine lovers of the poetic science look with anxious eyes to Mr. Boswell, desiring that every merit of the stupendous mortal may be shewn in its fairest light; but expecting also, that impartial justice, so worthy of a generous mind, which the popular cry cannot influence to flatter the object of discrimination, nor yet the yearnings of remembered amity induce, to invest that object with unreal perfection, injurious, from the severity of his censures, to the rights of others’ (Waingrow, ed., Correspondence &c., p. 65).
45. For an estimation of the number of days Boswell and Johnson could have spent together – a surprisingly small number, as it turns out – see P. A. W. Collins, ‘Boswell’s Contact with Johnson’, Notes and Queries, 201 (1956), pp. 163-6.
46. Life of Johnson, below, pp. 262, 285, 320, 706, 975.
47. Ibid., p. 736.
48. Ibid., p. 758.
49. Ibid., p. 975.
50. Ibid., p. 706.
51. Ibid., p. 212.
52. Ibid., p. 296.
53. Ibid., p. 311. Cf. Reynolds and Boswell on Johnson’s unceremonious alacrity of riposte: ‘Sir Joshua observed to me the extraordinary promptitude with which Johnson flew upon an argument. “Yes, (said I,) he has no formal preparation, no flourishing with his sword; he is through your body in an instant”’ (ibid., p. 456.). Cf. also William Hamilton on the two modes of Johnsonian conversation (ibid., pp. 824-5).
54. Ibid., p. 235, 743.
55. Ibid., p. 232.
56. Ibid., p. 531. Cf. ‘Johnson could not brook appearing to be worsted in argument, even when he had taken the wrong side, to shew the force and dexterity of his talents’ (ibid., p. 824).
57. Ibid., p. 1006.
58. Ibid., p. 383.
59. Ibid., p. 866.