James Boswell
James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck (29 October 1740 – 19 May 1795) was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He is best known for the biography he wrote of one of his contemporaries, the English literary figure Samuel Johnson, which the modern Johnsonian critic Harold Bloom has claimed is the greatest biography written in the English language.
Boswell's surname has passed into the English language as a term (Boswell, Boswellian, Boswellism) for a constant companion and observer, especially one who records those observations in print. In A Scandal in Bohemia, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes affectionately says of Dr. Watson, who narrates the tales, "I am lost without my Boswell."
Read more about James Boswell: Early Life, European Travels, Mature Life, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, Slavery, Discovery of Papers, Works, Published Journals
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“I borrowed today out of the Advocate’s Library, David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, but found it so abstruse, so contrary to sound sense and reason, and so drearying its effects on the mind, if it had any, that I resolved to return it without reading it.
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—James Boswell (1740–1795)
“Since belief is measured by action, he who forbids us to believe religion to be true, necessarily also forbids us to act as we should if we did believe it to be true.”
—William James (1842–1910)
“The anarchy, assassination, and sacrilege by which the Kingdom of France has been disgraced, desolated, and polluted for some years past cannot but have excited the strongest emotions of horror in every virtuous Briton. But within these days our hearts have been pierced by the recital of proceedings in that country more brutal than any recorded in the annals of the world.”
—James Boswell (1740–1795)