Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Plan your visit. 225 Madison Avenue at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016.

Autograph letter signed with initials : London, to [William Johnson] Temple, 1775 Apr. [4].

BIB_ID
379756
Accession number
MA 981.48
Creator
Boswell, James, 1740-1795.
Display Date
1775 Apr. [4].
Credit line
Purchased by Pierpont Morgan before 1906.
Description
1 item (4 p.) ; 33.4 cm
Notes
Day is illegible; the 4th is based on the 1857 printed version of the letter.
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.
Pieces of the paper are missing with some loss of text.
Provenance
Major William Stone; purchased by Pierpont Morgan from the London dealer J. Pearson & Co. before 1906.
Summary
Reporting that his "mind formerly a wild has been for some years pretty well enclosed with moral fences," and he is finding these fences "better than [he] thought them" because he is managing to resist the temptation of "Concubinage" in London; telling him that Temple's "character of [Thomas] Gray" has been printed in the London Magazine and appears "as the Peroration of [William] Mason's Life of Gray"; encouraging Temple to write and publish more; discussing all his dining engagements in London and mentioning Sir Joshua Reynolds, Samuel Johnson, Sir John Pringle, etc.