glance at the complex case he himself was preparng for the last assizes: "He was a very good scholar, knew a great many things, had an elegant taste and was very affectionate. But he had no conduct. His money was all gone; and, do you know, he was not confined to one woman? He had a strange kind of religion. But, I flatter myself, he will be ere long, if he is not already, in Heaven." [My italics.]
Poor Boswell! He hoped all his life for a blessed resurrection, and now he has got one—a resurrection of that quick, curious, eager, affectionate spirit, so scintillant and vivacious, so subject to somber hypochondriac vapors. He has got, also, a resurrection "of the body," according to the aspiration of his creed, with his tied wig, his pointed nose, the fat collops of his double chin, his stomach ruined by alcohol and refusing food, long fevers and shameful diseases clinging to him from nights spent, after intoxication from drinking the health of his intended wife, with girls of doubtful virtue. But all of these ignominies of the unruly flesh, quite unbecoming the friend of Paoli and the disciple of the moral Johnson, as he would be the first to acknowledge, were veiled from a censorious world during his lifetime by "a suit of imperial blue lined with rose-colored silk and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons."
Here he is again, the naughty, irrepressible fellow with no conduct, whom the sternest moralist of his day loved like a son; who brought to another stern moralist, Carlyle, more pleasure than any other of the fifteen million souls whose decorum he outraged; and who was declared by Lord Macaulay to be as indubitably the first of biographers as Homer is the first of poets.
