Fitful and unsuccessful legal and political ambitions occupied a large part of Boswell's later years. He made some approaches to standing as a candidate for Ayrshire in 1784, { 86} and again in 1788, was called to the English Bar in 1786, attached himself to Lord Lonsdale, and hoped to enter Parliament for one of his boroughs, but seems to have got nothing out of his connection with that insolent old bully but a certain amount of humiliation and the Recordership of Carlisle. That unimportant office was the only substantial reward he received from all his long suit and service in the antechambers of law and politics. Whatever he achieved he owed to literature and the friends his love of literature had brought him. It was not the laird or the lawyer, but the friend and biographer of Johnson whom the Royal Academy appointed in 1791 to the complimentary office of their Secretary for Foreign Correspondence. And those last years, while they brought him disappointment in everything else, saw him take definite rank as a successful author. The _Tour to the Hebrides_ was published in 1785, and sold out in a few weeks. The third edition was issued within a year of the appearance of the first. It was followed by the publication of Johnson's famous Letter to Lord Chesterfield and of an account of his Conversation with George III, and finally in 1791 by the _Life_ itself. A second edition of this was called for in 1793. Boswell only lived two years more. He died on May 19, 1795. He left two sons, Alexander, { 87} who became Sir Alexander, was the principal mover in the matter of the Burns Monument on the banks of Doon, and was killed in a duel in 1822; and James, who supplied notes for the third edition of his father's great book, and edited the third _Variorum Shakespeare_, known as Boswell's _Malone_, in 1821.