Professor Tinker's book,[1] which every library and every Johnsonian and Boswellian will wish to possess, gives us the most accurate, comprehensive, intimate and scandalous account now available of one of the most captivating figures in the entire range of English literature. There are a hundred hitherto unpublished letters, including a series addressed to the steward of Boswell's estate at Auchinleck. More important than these considerations is the restoration of the original text of the letters to Temple, which are the piece de resistance.
Since 1857, when the series was first published, with the disreputable editing and the grave expurgations characteristic of that decorous Victorian time, apparently no one had studied what Boswell actually wrote till Professor Tinker explored the manuscript treasures in the possession of Mr. J. P. Morgan. After due hesitation, he decided to reproduce with practically immaculate integrity the correspondence in which Boswell shows himself to Temple naked and only intermittently ashamed.
His editorial work may serve as a model to all editors of letters; and all scholars, of course, know that Professor Tinker is much more than a master of editorial technique. In the flourishing Yale school for the study of eighteenth century literature, Professor Tinker has for some years appeared to be, as Boswell said of Malone, "Johnsonianissimus," with his studies of "Johnson and Fanny Burney," "The Salon and English Letters," "Young Boswell" and "Nature's Simple Plan." But his long frequentation of the wits and the blue stockings who bowed to the Great Bear appears at present as but preliminary to the "insidious
- ↑ Letters of James Boswell, New York, 1924, two vols.
