3-082-847 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Boswell Centenary: James Boswell, of Auchinleck, 1895. 'Born 1740. Died May 19, 1795. Sketched by Sir Thomas Lawrence. One hundred and thirty-two years ago, in this very month of May, a young Scottish gentleman had the impudence to publish to the world the letters which had passed between himself and a friend. In one of them, written when he was but twenty-one, he said: "I am thinking of the perfect knowledge which I shall acquire of men and manners, of the intimacies which I shall form with the learned and ingenious in every science, and of the many amusing literary anecdotes which I shall record." Never has vanity been better justified. James Boswell did acquire, if not a perfect yet a most curious knowledge of men and manners; he did form not only intimacies but warm friendships with the learned and ingenious, and he not only picked up many amusing literary anecdotes, but he interwove them into a book which is unsurpassed in its kind in any language, and which is read again and again with never-failing pleasure by all classes of men wherever the English tongue is spoken...He was a heaven-born biographer'. As well as his "Life of Samuel Johnson", Boswell also published the journal of "A Tour to the Hebrides" and "An account of Corsica". From "Illustrated London News", 1895.