Plums there are aplenty in the latest serving of Boswellian pudding. (Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766-1769, edited by Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle. McGraw-Hill, $6). Some of them, it is true, are a bit on the green side, while others were obviously a little rotten before they were ripe. But all in all, one will find here a rich harvest of human-interest material—vignettes, anecdotes, personalia, and a great deal of shirt-sleeve history, with an occasional jeu d’es-prit or a little Platonic dialogue on the half-shell thrown in for good measure.
Boswell’s love affairs (to stop far short of calling many of them by their right names) crowd the pages of the present volume. And throughout the relatively short span covered by it, Boswell is continually on the lookout for, as our sociologists are so fond of putting it, a mate. At times, however, the leitmotif gets lost in the shuffle. “After unpacking my trunk,” writes Boswell, “I sallied forth like a roaring lion after girls, blending philosophy and raking.”
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