Note 33: — Chapter VI

It was vanity of this kind which, more than anything else, made a fool of Boswell. The insatiable desire to be conspicuous which made him as a young man publish what he must have known to be worthless, appear at the Shakespeare Jubilee as Corsican Boswell, and insert notices of his movements in the papers,33 did not diminish as one might expect with maturity, but rather grew with his years. There is nothing which he wrote so egotistical and vain as some passages in those most serious documents which he addressed to the 'People of Scotland upon the State of the Nation' and to which were pinned his hopes of political honour. In the letter of 1783 he says of himself: