That 'authour,' however, was now bent on extracting the sanction of approval from his idol. He hastened to London, heralding his arrival, as was his wont, by a deftly contributed paragraph to the papers. The society journals of to-day have not improved on Boswell in their method of obtaining first hand information; he was a most assiduous chronicler of his own actions, and there can be no doubt that there is much Boswell 'copy' buried in the pages of the papers of the time. From the _Public Advertizer_ of February 28th we learn 'James Boswell, Esq., is expected in town,' and, on March 24th, 'yesterday James Boswell, Esq., arrived from Scotland at his lodgings in Half Moon Street, Piccadilly.' He had received no letter from Johnson since the one in which the Latinity of his thesis had been criticised, and Boswell had heard that the publication in his book of a letter from his friend had given offence to its writer. Johnson was in Oxford at the time, and thither flew Bozzy to obtain the approval of his labours and, with an eye to all future contingencies, his sanction for the publication _in his biography_ of all Johnson's letters to him. 'When I am dead, sir,' was the reply, 'you may do as you will.'
'My book,' he writes eagerly to Temple, 'has amazing celebrity. Lord Lyttelton, Mr Walpole, Mrs Macaulay, and Mr Garrick, have all written me noble letters about it. There are two Dutch translations going forward.' General Oglethorpe, an old veteran who had seen service under Prince Eugene, and the friend of Pope whose verses upon him 'I had read from my early years,' called upon him and solicited his acquaintance. He became a sort of literary lion. 'I am really the great man now,' he cries; 'I have David Hume in the forenoon, Mr Johnson in the afternoon of the same day. I give admirable dinners and good claret, and the moment I go abroad again, which will be in a day or two, I set up my chariot. This is enjoying the fruit of my labours, and appearing like the friend of Paoli.' Alas for that friend!--he confesses to his correspondent that he has been 'wild.' The form of this outbreak may be sufficiently seen by the general reader in the leading questions which at this time Boswell is found putting to Johnson; for the _Life of Johnson_, as we shall indicate in its proper place, is no less the life of the biographer, whose mind was ever seeking to shelter itself under the guidance of a stronger force, and to effect a moral anchorage or moorings behind the lee of his great friend. When Bozzy indulges in 'the luxury of noble sentiments,' he is often known to be courting an indemnity to his conscience for lax practice. Longfellow makes Miles Standish in his belligerent mood turn in the Cæsar to where the thumb-marks in the margin proclaimed that the battle was hottest; Boswell often indicates the decline and fall of the moralist by an apparently undue vein of pietistic comments.