And coming events now cast their shadow before. That curious feature of Boswell's character, the mixture of religious sentiments and the Sterne vein of pietistic moralizing united with laxity in practice, appears strangely enough in the letter to Temple, dated in the February of 1767, and sent to his friend who had just been ordained to the living of Mamhead in Devon. 'I view,' he writes, 'the profession of a clergyman in an amiable and respectable light. Don't be moved by declamations against ecclesiastical history, as if that could blacken the sacred order.' He admits that ecclesiastical history is not the best field for the display of the virtues in that profession, but we are to judge of the thousands of worthy divines who have been a blessing to their parishes. He exhorts his friend to labour cheerfully in the vineyard and to leave not a tare in Mamhead. In Edinburgh it appears there were specimens; for after this pious homily he confesses quietly his own _liaison_ with 'a dear infidel' of a married woman. But the love affairs of Boswell, one of the most curious and 'characteristical' (as he would himself have phrased it) episodes in his life we shall discuss in a connected form in the next chapter, in order to secure clearness of treatment and concentration of detail.
We turn, then, to his career at the bar. There can be no shadow of a doubt that with proper industry, backed as he was with very strong social and family connections, he would have secured a lucrative professional practice. In February of 1767 he is 'coming into great employment; I have this winter made sixty-five guineas, which is a considerable sum for a young man,' and the _Boswelliana_ shew him in easy intercourse with the best society in the Scottish capital. Belonging as he did to the hereditary _noblesse de la robe_, as Lockhart calls it, he was not likely, with but moderate attention, to have stood like Scott, 'an hour by the Tron, wi' deil ane to speir his price,'--Sir Walter's fee book shews for the first year a return of £24, 3s., and £57, 15s. for the second. As he had years before vowed to Lord Hailes that he would transcribe Erskine's _Institutes_ several times over till he had imprinted it on his memory, so now he was hopeful by binding up the session papers of securing a treasure of law reasoning and a collection of extraordinary facts. By March he had cleared eighty guineas, and was 'Surprised at myself, I speak with so much ease and boldness, and have already the language of the bar so much at command. I am doing nobly. I can hardly ever answer the letters of my friends.' He had quarrelled with Rousseau who had likewise broken with Hume, whose appointment as secretary to Conway had perhaps cured him of his follies over the wild philosopher. We find Boswell also designing squibs which were in the London printshops, writing verses for them and ridiculing 'The Savage' of his former idolatry.