Johnson checked by one of his habitual gibes at the quantity of easily
accessible desert in Scotland. Boswell is equally frank in describing
himself in situations more provocative of contempt than even drunkenness
in a drawing-room. He tells us how dreadfully frightened he was by a
storm at sea in the Hebrides, and how one of his companions, "with a
happy readiness," made him lay hold of a rope fastened to the masthead,
and told him to pull it when he was ordered. Boswell was thus kept
quiet in mind and harmless in body.

This extreme simplicity of character makes poor Boswell loveable in his
way. If he sought notoriety, he did not so far mistake his powers as to
set up for independent notoriety.[1] He was content to shine in
reflected light: and the affectations with which he is charged seem to
have been unconscious imitations of his great idol. Miss Burney traced
some likeness even in his dress. In the later part of the _Life_ we meet
phrases in which Boswell is evidently aping the true Johnsonian style.
So, for example, when somebody distinguishes between "moral" and
"physical necessity;" Boswell exclaims, "Alas, sir, they come both to
the same thing. You may be as hard bound by chains when covered by
leather, as when the iron appears." But he specially emulates the
profound melancholy of his hero. He seems to have taken pride in his
sufferings from hypochondria; though, in truth, his melancholy diverges
from Johnson's by as great a difference as that which divides any two
varieties in Jaques's classification. Boswell's was the melancholy of a
man who spends too much, drinks too much, falls in love too often, and
is forced to live in the country in dependence upon a stern old parent,
when he is longing for a jovial life in London taverns. Still he was
excusably vexed when Johnson refused to believe in the reality of his
complaints, and showed scant sympathy to his noisy would-be
fellow-sufferer. Some of Boswell's freaks were, in fact, very trying.