Horace Walpole's Letters, and with pencil in hand and some little hope
still in heart, managed to get a few notes taken. Three winters I had to
spend on the shores of the Mediterranean. During two of them my malady
and my distress allowed of no rival, and my work made scarcely any
advance. The third my strength was returning, and in the six months that
I spent three years ago in San Remo I wrote out very many of the notes
which I am now submitting to my readers.

An interval of some years of comparative health that I enjoyed between
my two severest illnesses allowed me to try my strength as a critic and
an editor. In _Dr. Johnson: His Friends and his Critics_, which I
published in the year 1878, I reviewed the judgments passed on Johnson
and Boswell by Lord Macaulay and Mr. Carlyle, I described Oxford as it
was known to Johnson, and I threw light on more than one important
passage in the _Life_. The following year I edited Boswell's _Journal of
a Tour to Corsica_ and his curious correspondence with the Hon. Andrew
Erskine. The somewhat rare little volume in which are contained the
lively but impudent letters that passed between these two friends I had
found one happy day in an old book-stall underneath the town hall of
Keswick. I hoped that among the almost countless readers of Boswell
there would be many who would care to study in one of the earliest
attempts of his joyous youth the man whose ripened genius was to place
him at the very head of all the biographers of whom the world can boast.
My hopes were increased by the elegance and the accuracy of the
typography with which my publishers, Messrs. De La Rue & Co., adorned
this reprint. I was disappointed in my expectations. These curious
Letters met with a neglect which they did not deserve. Twice, moreover,
I was drawn away from the task that I had set before me by other works.
By the death of my uncle, Sir Rowland Hill, I was called upon to edit
his _History of the Penny Postage_, and to write his _Life_. Later on