BOSWELL (JAMES)

Autograph letter signed ("adieu Dear Sir/ James Boswell") to Alexander Burnett ("Dear Sir"), Chargé d'Affaires in Berlin, Geneva, 27 December 1764

Footnotes

'MAY YOUR PUNCH BE STRONG AND YOUR MIRTH LOUD': BOSWELL ON BEER, POETRY, AND VOLTAIRE.

Boswell writes warmly to his friend Alexander Burnett a few days before his departure for Italy and on the day of his visit to Voltaire. He is responding to Burnett's reply to his letter of 14 October 1764, in which Burnett writes '...I regret much your Absence, I have not had an honest and heartly laugh since you left me, which by the bye... is as necessary in My Opinion for the Conservation of health as a Copiosum...' (Alexander Burnett, 20 October 1764, Yale MS. C704). Boswell reminisces on their recent jollity, jokes about the strength of the Prussian beer and commends him to fellow Scot Captain John Wake, the privateer, with whom he had dined uproariously in Berlin in the company Captain Scott and Lieutenant Macpherson (Boswell's Journal, 12 September). It was evidently this '...continued series of Amusement and Dissipation...' (Alexander Burnett to Andrew Mitchell, 8 September 1772) that kept Boswell enjoying the pleasures of Europe and reluctant to return home as his father desired (see preceding lot).

Also keeping him in Europe was Boswell's long-held ambition to meet Voltaire who, with Rousseau, he described as 'to me greater objects than most statues or pictures'. Their meeting was a high point in his travels and an opportunity not to be missed. He writes from Geneva, the city of Calvin and 'the point of departure for Voltaire's chateau... Boswell went to Ferney on the afternoon of 24 December and stayed there from 27 to 29 December, having gained permission from Voltaire to stay two nights' (ed. Marlies K. Danziger, James Boswell: The Journal of his German & Swiss Travels, 1764, 2008, p.xxxiv). Boswell's few remaining notes on their conversations, recorded on the day of our letter, are preserved at Yale (MS. J 6.1). They demonstrate Voltaire's brilliant wit and excellent command of the English language. Topics of discussion included English literature, of which he demonstrated an extensive knowledge, albeit with little appreciation for Shakespeare ('often two good lines never six'), and quoted Dryden and Milton, touching also on religion and politics. A long, effusive (and widely published) account of the meeting written on 28 December, the day after our letter, from Boswell to his childhood friend William Johnson Temple, speaks of Voltaire as a magician, his visit a virtuoso performance: '...He was all brilliance... When he talked our language he was animated with the soul of a Briton. He had bold flights. He had humour. He had an extravagance... a forcible oddity of style that the most comical of our dramatis personae could not have exceeded. He swore bloodily, as was the fashion when he was in England... At last we came upon religion. Then did he rage...'. Boswell passes on just one comment of Voltaire's in our letter, made at his expense, translating as "Do you have an Envoy in Berlin now? – No Sir we only have one Chargé d'Affaires. Ah (said he) a chargé d'affaires is hardly busy".

This letter is published in Susan Burnett, Without Fanfare: The Story of my Family, 1994, p.122, and has been held in the archive at Kemnay House, Aberdeenshire, until now. It is not included in Chauncey Brewster Tinker's Letters of James Boswell, 1924.

Provenance: Alexander Burnett, 4th of Kemnay (1735-1802); and thence by descent.