Boswell's Reference to Erasmus on his Fear of Death

Abstract

PAUL TANKARD has recently published a scholarly edition of 133 pieces of James Boswell’s journalism written for newspapers and magazines.1 Tankard is to be credited for making these writings available in modern form and, especially, for providing thorough and accurate annotations for one of the more allusive eighteenth-century writers. Here I offer a solution to one of the few mysteries he has not solved. The second paragraph of Boswell’s ‘Sentimental Essay on Death’, published in the Gentleman’s Magazine (February 1786), is a dense fabric of allusions: ‘It is impossible’, says Swift, ‘that so universal a thing as Death can be intended as an evil’. For many years after the discharge of this opinion he was daily tormented with the terror of death: ‘my earliest visitation, and my last at even’. This is also the confession of Erasmus, at a certain time of his life, in a letter to a friend. (p. 363)