Boswell, Johnson and Their Friends

JAAIES L. CLIFI'ORD

HAPPILY, Columbia, which in the past has not been the
repository of much valuable material connected with
the Johnson Circle, has recently acquired a number of
interesting unpublished letters. In the large Jack Samuels Collec¬
tion, for example, there is a hitherto unknown letter of James
Boswell. Addressed to the young dramatist, George Colman the
Younger, and dated July 28, 1792, it is not of great literary sig¬
nificance; yet from the biographical point of view any document
which describes a man's movements and his personal relationships
is useful. Colman's letter to which this is an answer has apparently
not survived.

His epoch-making Life of Johnson having been published the
year before, Boswell was now a widower living in London, in¬
volved in numerous projects—a revised edition of the Life, plan¬
ning a possible life of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had died earlier
in the year, and other biographies. With perhaps less than his orig¬
inal zest for meeting important people, he was still eager to make
new friends, as this letter clearly shows. The Surrender of Calais,
Colman's seventh play, had first appeared the year before, in July
1791, and had been received with a chorus of praise, though there
were some who disagreed, and \Villiam Gifford in his satire The
Baviad referred to "Colman's flippant trash." Still, this musicalized
chronicle history, episodic in form, had made Colman a man worth
knowing. At least Boswell thought so. Boswell's trip was to join
his son "Sandie" for the formal breaking up of tlie Eton school
term on July 30. He sta\'ed at the Star and Garter Inn in Wind¬
sor.* What follows is the text of the letter:

* According to Arthur Dixon of the University of North Carolina at Greens¬
boro.