in which he explains that he has an amiable mistress who, unfortunately, has also a husband. His clerical friend hereupon seems to have blamed him for 'keeping another man's wife.' Boswell is startled at the phrase. That was literally his scheme, as he admits, but 'imagination represented it just as being fond of a pretty, lively black little lady, who, to oblige me, stayed in Edinburgh, and I very genteelly paid her expenses.' A year later Temple gives him a 'moral lecture' for some scrape into which he has fallen, and gets for answer that Boswell's 'warm imagination looks forward with great complacency on the sobriety, the healthfulness, and the worth of his future life.' His imagination retained this inestimable power up to the last, and it must be admitted, would be an admirable consoler to a feeble conscience. It told him one truth, however, in 1790: namely, that he was writing what would be, 'without exception, the most entertaining book' that his correspondent had ever read. Too characteristically he had realised his aspirations just when success became valueless. But, as a rule, he is in the odd position of one who lives in a dream world, and yet one whose dreams are always a version of realities.
