Note 12: — Chapter XI
Reading edition
The journal itself was kept in quarto and octavo volumes,12 and Boswell on one occasion showed it to Sir William Forbes.13 It seems that his object in doing this was to get an opinion which might encourage him to publish; he quotes with great pleasure in the 'Life' the praise which this gentleman had bestowed upon it. One would suppose that the journal displayed in this way gave the Johnsonian conversations and anecdotes in words almost identical with the text of the 'Life.' In the preface to the 'Corsican Journal' Boswell says of the Paoli memoirs: