Part 20

The friendship, consecrated by the most delightful of biographies, and one of the most gorgeous feasts in the whole banquet of letters, was not so ill-assorted as has been inconsiderately maintained. Boswell's freshness at the table of conversation gave a new zest to every maxim that Johnson enunciated, while Boswell developed a perfect genius for interpreting the kind of worldly philosophy at which Johnson was so unapproachable. Both men welcomed an excuse for avoiding the task-work of life. Johnson's favourite indulgence was to talk; Boswell's great idea of success to elicit memorable conversation. Boswell is almost equally admirable as a reporter and as an interviewer, as a collector and as a researcher. He prepared meetings for Johnson, he prepared topics for him, he drew him out on questions of the day, he secured a copy of his famous letter to Lord Chesterfield, he obtained an almost verbatim report of Johnson's interview with the king, he frequented the tea-table of Miss Williams, he attended the testy old scholar on lengthy peregrinations in the Highlands and in the midlands. "Sir," said Johnson to his follower, "you appear to have only two subjects, yourself and me, and I am sick of both." Yet thorough as the scheme was from the outset, and admirable as was the devotedness of the biographer, Boswell was far too volatile a man to confine himself to any one ambition in life that was not consistent with a large amount of present fame and notoriety. He would have liked to Boswellize the popular idol Wilkes, or Chatham, or Voltaire, or even the great Frederick himself. As it was, during his continental tour he managed in the autumn of 1765 to get on terms with Pasquale di Paoli, the leader of the Corsican insurgents in their unwise struggle against Genoa. After a few weeks in Corsica he returned to London in February 1766, and was received by Johnson with the utmost cordiality. In accordance with the family compact referred to, he was now admitted advocate at Edinburgh, and signalized his return to the law by an enthusiastic pamphlet entitled _The Essence of the Douglas Cause_ (November 1767), in which he vigorously repelled the charge of imposture from the youthful claimant. In the same year he issued a little book called _Dorando_, containing a history of the Douglas cause in the guise of a Spanish tale, and bringing the story to a conclusion by the triumph of Archibald Douglas in the law courts. Editors who published extracts while the case was still _sub judice_ were censured severely by the court of session; but though his identity was notorious the author himself escaped censure. In the spring of 1768 Boswell published through the Foulis brothers of Glasgow his _Account of Corsica, Journal of a Tour to that Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli_. The liveliness of personal impression which he managed to communicate to all his books gained for this one a deserved success, and the _Tour_ was promptly translated into French, German, Italian and Dutch. Walpole and others, jeered, but Boswell was talked about everywhere, as Paoli Boswell or Paoli's Englishman, and to aid the mob in the task of identifying him at the Shakespeare jubilee of 1769 he took the trouble to insert a placard in his hat bearing the legend "Corsica Boswell." The amazing costume of "a Corsican chief" which he wore on this occasion was described at length in the magazines.

On the 25th of November 1769, after a short tour in Ireland undertaken to empty his head of Corsica (Johnson's emphatic direction), Boswell married his cousin Margaret Montgomery at Lainshaw in Ayrshire. For some years henceforth his visits to London were brief, but on the 30th of April 1773 he was present at his admission to the Literary Club, for which honour he had been proposed by Johnson himself, and in the autumn of this year in the course of his tour to the Hebrides Johnson visited the Boswells in Ayrshire. Neither Boswell's father nor his wife shared his enthusiasm for the lexicographer. Lord Auchinleck remarked that Jamie was "gane clean gyte ... And whose tail do ye think he has pinned himself to now, man? A dominie, an auld dominie, that keepit a schule and ca'd it an academy!" Housewives less prim than Mrs Boswell might have objected to Johnson's habit of turning lighted candles upside down when in the parlour to make them burn better. She called the great man a bear. Boswell's _Journal of a Tour in the Hebrides_ was written for the most part during the journey, but was not published until the spring of 1786. The diary of Pepys was not then known to the public, and Boswell's indiscretions as to the emotions aroused in him by the neat ladies' maids at Inveraray, and the extremity of drunkenness which he exhibited at Corrichatachin, created a literary sensation and sent the _Tour_ through three editions in one year. In the meantime his pecuniary and other difficulties at home were great; he made hardly more than L100 a year by his profession, and his relations with his father were chronically strained. In 1775 he began to keep terms at the Inner Temple and managed to see a good deal of Johnson, between whom and John Wilkes he succeeded in bringing about a meeting at the famous dinner at Dilly's on the 15th of May 1776. On the 30th of August 1782 his father died, leaving him an estate worth L1600 a year. On the 30th of June 1784, Boswell met Johnson for the last time at a dinner at Sir Joshua Reynolds's. He accompanied him back in the coach from Leicester Square to Bolt Court. "We bade adieu to each other affectionately in the carriage. When he had got down upon the foot pavement he called out 'Fare you well'; and without looking back, sprung away with a kind of pathetic briskness, if I may use that expression, which seemed to indicate a struggle to conceal uneasiness, and impressed me with a foreboding of our long, long separation." Johnson died that year, and two years later the Boswells moved to London. In 1789 Mrs Boswell died, leaving five children. She had been an excellent mother and a good wife, despite the infidelities and drunkenness of her husband, and from her death Boswell relapsed into worse excesses, grievously aggravated by hypochondria. He died of a complication of disorders at his house in Great Poland Street on the 19th of May 1795, and was buried a fortnight later at Auchinleck.

Up to the eve of his last illness Boswell had been busy upon his magnum opus, _The Life of Samuel Johnson_, which was in process of crystallization to the last. The first edition was published in two quarto volumes in an edition of 1700 copies on the 16th of May 1791. He was preparing a third edition when he died; this was completed by his friend Edmund Malone, who brought out a fifth edition in 1807. That of James Boswell junior (the editor of Malone's _Variorum Shakespeare_, 1821) appeared in 1811.

The _Life of Johnson_ was written on a scale practically unknown to biographers before Boswell. It is a full-length with all the blotches and pimples revealed ("I will not make my tiger a cat to please anybody," wrote "Bozzy"). It may be overmuch an exhibition of oddities, but it is also, be it remembered, a pioneer application of the experimental method to the determination of human character. Its size and lack of divisions (to divide it into chapters was an original device of Croker's) are a drawback, and have prevented Boswell's _Life_ from that assured triumph abroad which has fallen to the lot of various English classics such as _Robinson Crusoe_ or _Gulliver's Travels_. But wherever English is spoken, it has become a veritable sacred book and has pervaded English life and thought in the same way, that the Bible, Shakespeare and Bunyan have done. Boswell has successfully (to use his own phrase) "Johnsonized" Britain, but has not yet Johnsonized the planet. The model originally proposed to himself by Boswell was Mason's _Life of Gray_, but he far surpassed that, or indeed any other, model. The fashion that Boswell adopted of giving the conversations not in the neutral tints of _oratio obliqua_ but in full _oratio recta_ was a stroke of genius. But he is far from being the mere mechanical transmitter of good things. He is a dramatic and descriptive artist of the first order. The extraordinary vitality of his figures postulates a certain admixture of fiction, and it is certain that Boswell exaggerates the sympathy expressed in word or deed by Johnson for some of his own tenderer foibles. But, on the whole, the best judges are of opinion that Boswell's accuracy is exceptional, as it is undoubtedly seconded by a power of observation of a singular retentiveness and intensity. The difficulty of dramatic description can only be realized, as Jowett well pointed out, by those who have attempted it, and it is not until we compare Boswell's reports with those of less skilful hearers that we can appreciate the skill with which the essence of a conversation is extracted, and the whole scene indicated by a few telling touches. The result is that Johnson, not, it is true, in the early days of his poverty, total idleness and the pride of literature, but in the fulness of fame and competence of fortune from 1763 to 1784, is better known to us than any other man in history. The old theory to explain such a marvel (originally propounded by Gray when the _Tour in Corsica_ appeared) that "any fool may write a valuable book by chance" is now regarded as untenable. If fool is a word to describe Boswell (and his folly was at times transcendent) he wrote his great book because and not in despite of the fact that he was one. There can be no doubt, in fact, that he was a biographical genius, and that he arranged his opportunities just as he prepared his transitions and introduced those inimitable glosses by which Johnson's motives are explained, his state of mind upon particular occasions indicated, and the general feeling of his company conveyed. This remarkable literary faculty, however, was but a fraction of the total make-up requisite to produce such a masterpiece as the _Life_. There is a touch of genius, too, in the naif and imperturbable good nature and persistency ("Sir, I will not be baited with 'what' and 'why.' 'Why is a cow's tail long?' 'Why is a fox's tail bushy?'"), and even in the abnegation of all personal dignity, with which Boswell pursued his hero. As he himself said of Goldsmith, "He had sagacity enough to cultivate assiduously the acquaintance of Johnson, and his faculties were gradually enlarged." Character, the vital principle of the individual, is the _ignis fatuus_ of the mechanical biographer. Its attainment may be secured by a variety of means--witness Xenophon, Cellini, Aubrey, Lockhart and Froude--but it has never been attained with such complete intensity as by Boswell in his _Life of Johnson_. The more we study Boswell, the more we compare him with other biographers, the greater his work appears.

The eleventh edition of Boswell's _Johnson_ was brought out by John Wilson Croker in 1831; in this the original text is expanded by numerous letters and variorum anecdotes and is already knee-deep in annotation. Its blunders provoked the celebrated and mutually corrective criticisms of Macaulay and Carlyle. Its value as an unrivalled granary of Johnsoniana, stored opportunely before the last links with a Johnsonian age had disappeared, has not been adequately recognized. A new edition of the original text was issued in 1874 by Percy Fitzgerald (who has also written a useful life of James Boswell in 2 vols., London, 1891); a six-volume edition, including the _Tour_ and Johnsoniana, was published by the Rev. Alexander Napier in 1884; the definitive edition is that by Dr Birkbeck Hill in 6 vols., 1887, with copious annotations and a model index. A generously illustrated edition was completed in 1907 in two large volumes by Roger Ingpen, and reprints of value have also been edited by R. Carruthers (with woodcuts), A. Birrell, Mowbray Morris (Globe edition) and Austin Dobson. A short biography of Boswell was written in 1896 by W. Keith Leask. Boswell's commonplace-book was published in 1876, under the title of _Boswelliana_, with a memoir by the Rev. C. Rogers. (T. Se.)

BOSWORTH, JOSEPH (1789-1876), British Anglo-Saxon scholar, was born in Derbyshire in 1789. Educated at Repton, whence he proceeded to Aberdeen University, he became in 1817 vicar of Little Horwood, Buckinghamshire, and devoted his spare time to literature and particularly to the study of Anglo-Saxon. In 1823 appeared his _Elements of Anglo-Saxon Grammar_. In 1829 Bosworth went to Holland as chaplain, first at Amsterdam and then at Rotterdam. He remained in Holland until 1840, working there on his _Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language_ (1838), his best-known work. In 1857 he became rector of Water Shelford, Buckinghamshire, and in the following year was appointed Rawlinson professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. He gave to the university of Cambridge in 1867 L10,000 for the establishment of a professorship of Anglo-Saxon. He died on the 27th of May 1876, leaving behind him a mass of annotations on the Anglo-Saxon charters.

BOTANY (from Gr. [Greek: botanae], plant; [Greek: bodkein], to graze), the science which includes everything relating to the vegetable kingdom, whether in a living or in a fossil state. It embraces a consideration of the external forms of plants--of their anatomical structure, however minute--of the functions which they perform --of their arrangement and classification--of their distribution over the globe at the present and at former epochs--and of the uses to which they are subservient. It examines the plant in its earliest state of development, and follows it through all its stages of progress until it attains maturity. It takes a comprehensive view of all the plants which cover the earth, from the minutest organism, only visible by the aid of the microscope, to the most gigantic productions of the tropics. It marks the relations which subsist between all members of the plant world, including those between existing groups and those which are known only from their fossilized remains preserved in the rocks. We deal here with the history and evolution of the science.

The plants which adorn the globe more or less in all countries must necessarily have attracted the attention of mankind from the earliest times. The science that treats of them dates back to the days of Solomon, who "spake of trees, from the cedar of Lebanon to the hyssop on the wall." The Chaldaeans, Egyptians and Greeks were the early cultivators of science, and botany was not neglected, although the study of it was mixed up with crude speculations as to vegetable life, and as to the change of plants into animals. About 300 years before Christ Theophrastus wrote a _History of Plants_, and described about 500 species used for the treatment of diseases. Dioscorides, a Greek writer, who appears to have flourished about the time of Nero, issued a work on Materia Medica. The elder Pliny described about a thousand plants, many of them famous for their medicinal virtues. Asiatic and Arabian writers also took up this subject. Little, however, was done in the science of botany, properly so called, until the 16th century of the Christian era, when the revival of learning dispelled the darkness which had long hung over Europe. Otto Brunfels, a physician of Bern, has been looked upon as the restorer of the science in Europe. In his _Herbarium_, printed at Strassburg (1530-1536), he gave descriptions of a large number of plants, chiefly those of central Europe, illustrated by beautiful woodcuts. He was followed by other writers,--Leonhard Fuchs, whose _Historia Stirpium_ (Basel, 1542) is worthy of special note for its excellent woodcuts; Hieronymus Bock, whose _Kreutter Buch_ appeared in 1539; and William Turner, "The Father of English Botany," the first part of whose _New Herbal_, printed in English, was issued in 1551. The descriptions in these early works were encumbered with much medicinal detail, including speculations as to the virtues of plants. Plants which were strikingly alike were placed together, but there was at first little attempt at systematic classification. A crude system, based on the external appearance of plants and their uses to man, was gradually evolved, and is well illustrated in the _Herbal_, issued in 1597 by John Gerard (1545-1612), a barber-surgeon, who had a garden in Holborn, and was a keen student of British plants.

One of the earliest attempts at a methodical arrangement of plants was made in Florence by Andreas Caesalpinus (1519-1603), who is called by Linnaeus _primus verus systematicus_. In his work _De Plantis_, published at Florence in 1583, he distributed the 1520 plants then known into fifteen classes, the distinguishing characters being taken from the fruit.

John Ray (1627-1705) did much to advance the science of botany, and was also a good zoologist. He promulgated a system which may be considered as the dawn of the "natural system" of the present day (Ray, _Methodus Plantarum_, 1682). He separated flowering from flowerless plants, and divided the former into Dicotyledons and Monocotyledons. His orders (or "classes") were founded to some extent on a correct idea of the affinities of plants, and he far outstripped his contemporaries in his enlightened views of arrangement.

About the year 1670 Dr Robert Morison[1] (1620-1683), the first professor of botany at Oxford, published a systematic arrangement of plants, largely on the lines previously suggested by Caesalpinus. He divided them into eighteen classes, distinguishing plants according as they were woody or herbaceous, and taking into account the nature of the flowers and fruit. In 1690 Rivinus[2] promulgated a classification founded chiefly on the forms of the flowers. J.P. de Tournefort[3] (1656-1708), who about the same time took up the subject of vegetable taxonomy, was long at the head of the French school of botany, and published a systematic arrangement in 1694-1700. He described about 8000 species of plants, and distributed them into twenty-two classes, chiefly according to the form of the corolla, distinguishing herbs and under-shrubs on the one hand from trees and shrubs on the other. The system of Tournefort was for a long time adopted on the continent, but was ultimately displaced by that of Carl von Linne, or Linnaeus (q.v.; 1707-1778).

The system of Linnaeus was founded on characters derived from the stamens and pistils, the so-called sexual organs of the flower, and hence it is often called the sexual system. It is an artificial method, because it takes into account only a few marked characters in plants, and does not propose to unite them by natural affinities. It is an index to a department of the book of nature, and as such is useful to the student. It does not aspire to any higher character, and although it cannot be looked upon as a scientific and natural arrangement, still it has a certain facility of application which at once commended it. It does not of itself give the student a view of the true relations of plants, and by leading to the discovery of the name of a plant, it is only a stepping-stone to the natural system. Linnaeus himself claimed nothing higher for it. He says--"Methodi Naturalis fragmenta studiose inquirenda sunt. Primum et ultimum hoc in botanicis desideratum est. Natura non facit saltus. Plantae omnes utrinque affinitatem monstrant, uti territorium in mappa geographica." Accordingly, besides his artificial index, he also promulgated fragments of a natural method of arrangement.

The Linnean system was strongly supported by Sir James Edward Smith (1759-1828), who adopted it in his _English Flora_, and who also became possessor of the Linnean collection. The system was for a long time the only one taught in the schools of Britain, even after it had been discarded by those in France and in other continental countries.

The foundation of botanic gardens during the 16th and 17th centuries did much in the way of advancing botany. They were at first appropriated chiefly to the cultivation of medicinal plants. This was especially the case at universities, where medical schools existed. The first botanic garden was established at Padua in 1545, and was followed by that of Pisa. The garden at Leiden dates from 1577, that at Leipzig from 1579. Gardens also early existed at Florence and Bologna. The Montpellier garden was founded in 1592, that of Giessen in 1605, of Strassburg in 1620, of Altdorf in 1625, and of Jena in 1629. The Jardin des Plantes at Paris was established in 1626, and the Upsala garden in 1627. The botanic garden at Oxford was founded in 1632. The garden at Edinburgh was founded by Sir Andrew Balfour and Sir Robert Sibbald in 1670, and, under the name of the Physic Garden, was placed under the superintendence of James Sutherland, afterwards professor of botany in the university. The garden at Kew dates from about 1730, when Frederick, prince of Wales, obtained a long lease of Kew House and its gardens from the Capel family. After his death in 1751 his widow, Princess Augusta of Saxe-Gotha, showed great interest in their scientific development, and in 1759 engaged William Aiton to establish a Physic Garden. The garden of the Royal Dublin Society at Glasnevin was opened about 1796; that of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1807; and that of Glasgow in 1818. The Madrid garden dates from 1763, and that of Coimbra from 1773. Jean Gesner (1709-1790), a Swiss physician and botanist, states that at the end of the 18th century there were 1600 botanic gardens in Europe.

A new era dawned on botanical classification with the work of Antoine Laurent de Jussieu (1748-1836). His uncle, Bernard de Jussieu, had adopted the principles of Linnaeus's _Fragmenta_ in his arrangement of the plants in the royal garden at the Trianon. At an early age Antoine became botanical demonstrator in the Jardin des Plantes, and was thus led to devote his time to the science of botany. Being called upon to arrange the plants in the garden, he necessarily had to consider the best method of doing so, and, following the lines already suggested by his uncle, adopted a system founded in a certain degree on that of Ray, in which he embraced all the discoveries in organography, adopted the simplicity of the Linnean definitions, and displayed the natural affinities of plants. His _Genera Plantarum_, begun in 1778, and finally published in 1789, was an important advance, and formed the basis of all natural classifications. One of the early supporters of this natural method was Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778-1841), who in 1813 published his _Theorie elementaire de la botanique_, in which he showed that the affinities of plants are to be sought by the comparative study of the form and development of organs (morphology), not of their functions (physiology). His _Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis_ was intended to embrace an arrangement and description of all known plants. The work was continued after his death, by his son Alphonse de Candolle, with the aid of other eminent botanists, and embraces descriptions of the genera and species of the orders of Dicotyledonous plants. The system followed by de Candolle is a modification of that of Jussieu.

In arranging plants according to a natural method, we require to have a thorough knowledge of structural and morphological botany, and hence we find that the advances made in these departments have materially aided the efforts of systematic botanists.