BIB_ID
376809
Accession number
MA 981.2
Creator
Boswell, James, 1740-1795.
Display Date
1758 Dec. 16.
Credit line
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan before 1906.
Description
1 item (4 p.) ; 18.7 cm
Notes
Part of a large collection of letters from James Boswell to William Johnson Temple and related correspondence. Letters have been described in individual records; see MA 981 for details.
Provenance
Major William Stone; purchased by Pierpont Morgan from the London dealer J. Pearson & Co. before 1906.
Summary
Thanking him for his "beautiful and moving letter" and commenting on their friendship; noting that he sympathizes with him "in the want of agreable companions"; calling his "study of law" a "laborious task" and giving details of his daily schedule; telling him that he kept an "exact journal" while touring the Northern Circuit with his father and sent the pages by every post to Mr. Love, his "second best friend"; discussing a poem Temple sent to him and speculating that Temple wrote it; asking him to buy "Onania" [Onania, or the heinous sin of self-pollution, and all its frightful consequences -- an anonymous pamphlet on masturbation first published in London by 1716] for him in London.
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