The best edition for Boswell’s Hypochondriack, the series of seventy essays published anonymously in the London Magazine from October 1777 to August 1783, remains that of Margery Bailey (2 vols., Stanford University Press, 1928). In 2010 I published a gathering of thirty-three items, supplementing her copious and generally accurate annotations.1 I now can add eighteen more items: four published since 2010 (including two corrections of my original list) and fourteen new items.2No. 10 (July 1778), 1.172—“Carry along the metaphor, and it will appear that the Truth must be proportioned to the mind, and therefore if you will have your children rightly instructed, you must take the measure of their minds, a phrase used by Mr. John Home, though in a different sense.”Bailey’s note: “Boswell is perhaps misquoting from memory a line of Douglas (4.1.25): ‘Men’s minds are temper’d, like their swords, for war.’ I can find no other expression remotely suggesting the idea, in Home’s works.” Boswell’s allusion, however, refers only to the last phrase in his sentence, which is found later in Douglas (4.1): “If you presume / To bend on soldiers these disdainful eyes, / As if you took the measure of their minds, / And said in secret, you’re no match for me; / What will become of you?”No. 12 (Sept. 1778), 1.188–189—“Some nice spirits amongst us were offended even at the metaphorical expression in the late letter of a gallant, though unfortunate general officer, who ‘threw himself at his majesty’s feet for actual employment.’”General George Burgoyne’s letter of 1 Jan. 1777 containing this phrase was well known. For example, Wilkes refers to it thrice in parliamentary speeches; see The Speeches of John Wilkes Vol. I (London, 1777), 91–92 et passim. Unfortunate became Burgoyne’s epithet and his gesture the subject of a political and quasi-legal debate that surely made it even more memorable to Boswell and his audience. Thus we find in Observations on a Pamphlet Entitled, A Short History of Opposition, During the Last Session of Parliament . . . by a Member of Parliament (London, 1779), 38:No. 21 (June 1779), 1.270—“And thus being by the rules of discretion foretold, that to offend your sacred ears with multa, since to satisfy your gracious expectations with multum, is denied me, were an error of errors the most erroneous.”Boswell tells us he is quoting here Sir Edward Phelips, Speaker of the House of Commons at James I’s accession; moreover, he states that Phelips “has a deal of Quotations and allusions, and metaphors,” and his “returns” (that is, formal responses to the king’s addresses) Boswell is “positive from internal evidence have been dictated by James himself.” Bailey ignores the allusion to Pliny, Epistles 7.9, in Phelips’ quotation: Aiunt enim multum legendum esse, non multa [men say, read much, not many things]. Boswell would seemingly credit James I with the echo of Pliny the Younger’s injunction to quality, not quantity, and he likely found Phelips’s speech in The Parliamentary or Continental History of England, 2nd ed., 24 vols. (London, 1763), 5:51–52.No. 21 (June 1779), 1.272—“King James, whose talent at quoting was eminent, introduced into his first speech to his Parliament this complimentative species of Quotation. . . . He then in exhorting them to vigilance and care in their charges gives a specimen of his own style in a parenthesis ‘(the devil is so busy a bishop).’”Boswell’s entire essay is about quotation (what we would call allusion), and the passage is complicated by what Bailey points out is Boswell’s failure to correct completely his manuscript for the printer. James I’s parenthetical clause sometimes appears as “the devil is a busy bishop in his own parish” and is identified by collections of sayings as a Scottish proverb, so it is appropriate for both the king and Boswell. Perhaps, in addition, Boswell was aware that James’s clause had a source, or at least a precursor, within the famous “Sermon of the Plough” by Bishop Latimer. This would make the quotation a doubly effective conclusion to an essay on allusion. In a sermon preached around 1548, Latimer said, “And now I would ask a strange question, who is the most diligent bishop and prelate in all England, that passeth all the rest in doing of his office? . . . I will tell you—it is the devil. He is the most diligent preacher of all others; he is never out of his diocese; he is never from his cure; ye shall never find him unoccupied.” See Jacob Larwood, The Book of Clerical Anecdotes (London, [1871]), 247.No. 38 (Nov. 1780), 2.39—“In the Annual Register, 1765, there are some very agreeable reflections upon this subject [‘the advantage of the heir of an ancient inheritance being kept at the family-seat in his early years’], said to be extracted from a letter written by the Reverend Mr. Comber, of East-Newton, Yorkshire. . . . If the writer of the reflections be alive, he has my best wishes; and I should be happy to know more of him.”Bailey gives the title of the letter Boswell cites, but does not address his implicit closing question. Additional information provided by Melvyn New (personal correspondence) establishes that the letter’s author, Thomas Comber (1688–May 1765), had been dead for more than fifteen years when Boswell wrote his essay.No. 47 (Aug. 1781), 2.103–104—“But when a husband has his wife well frozen, he may go from home in full security, bidding defiance to her keenest lovers; for though good St. Anthony made a woman of snow for himself in the desert, we do not read that his gallantry needed much restraint.”Here Boswell’s lapsus penne, writing St. Anthony for St. Francis, confuses Bailey, who concludes, “Boswell distorts the legend of a most respectable saint in order to maintain the flippant tone of this essay.” St. Francis is credited in several eighteenth-century sources with fashioning a woman, even an entire family, out of snow. See Robert G. Walker, “Boswell’s Mistaken Saint: A Note to Hypochondriack No. 47,” Notes & Queries, 58 (2011), 425–427.No. 50 (Nov. 1781), 2.131—“I have seen a table of longevity, lately drawn up by a curious gentleman, consisting of three columns, one of kings, one of poets, and one of philosophers.”I tentatively, and erroneously, suggested in English Studies that the curious gentleman was Sir John Sinclair, an error I subsequently corrected in “Notes on Boswell Laird of Auchinleck, 1778–1782,” Age of Johnson, 22 (2012), 128–129, where a passage in Boswell Laird of Auchinleck, 1778–1782 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), 269, clearly establishes the identity: “[Francis Garden, Lord Gardenstone] entertained us with lists of the ages of eighteen kings, eighteen philosophers, and eighteen poets.”No. 54 (March 1782), 2.161—“But I beg leave at this parting to recommend to any of my readers who may not know it, the valuable, I had almost said divine, treatise of Thomas à Kempis, from which my motto is taken. . . . There is said to have been an edition of it in one language or other every month, since its first publication, three centuries ago.”Bailey points out a very similar passage from Boswell’s Life of Johnson (30 March 1778): “Thomas à Kempis (he observed) must be a good book, as the world has opened its arms to receive it. It is said to have been printed, in one language or other, as many times as there have been months since it first came out.” She continues, “Boswell’s lack of quotation marks makes it difficult to know whether the computation is Johnson’s or his own; as usual, however, he takes more care to phrase the matter clearly in the Life of J. than he does in the essay.” In fact, the computation is neither Boswell’s nor Johnson’s. Probably a commonplace, it was around at least since the first edition of Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopædia (London, 1728): “‘tis affirm’d, that Thomas à Kempis of the Imitation of Christ, has undergone more Impressions than there have been Months since it was first composed” (379). But Bailey may be correct in a way that did not occur to her. In the Life of Johnson Johnson mentions printings, while in the Hypochondriack Boswell speaks of editions. The Chambers entry in which the Imitation of Christ is mentioned is defining the word impression, and continues immediately, “Impression, however, differs from Edition. Impression, properly speaking, takes in no more, than what belongs to the Printing, the Letter, Paper, Margin . . . the Disposition of every thing that may have a good or bad Effect on the Eye. Edition, besides all this, takes in the Care of the Editor.” Johnson, then, may have been drawing a careful distinction that Boswell recorded accurately, albeit without full understanding.No. 55 (April 1782), 2.164–165—“I am not an absolute enemy either to enthusiasm or superstition, and the celebrated pamphlet, entitled ‘The Enthusiasm of Methodists and Papists compared,’ is very harmless and ineffectual in my opinion.”In 1749 George Lavington (1684–1762), bishop of Exeter, published the first in a series of pamphlets under this title. He drew responses from Wesley and Whitfield, among others, so Boswell is correct to term his work “celebrated,” and anti-Methodism was certainly still alive in 1782, three decades later, but one suspects that the title more than the contents made it an appropriate point of reference for his sectarian-balanced essay on religious enthusiasm.No. 57 (June 1782), 2.181—“The passion for wealth cannot subsist but in a state of society highly improved; for there is not scope for its operation in simple society; so that it marks the advancement of human nature as certainly, though not in so shocking a manner, as a circumstance which a gentleman of much original observation once pointed out, when travelling in a rich part of England, upon seeing a man hanging in chains on one side of the road, ‘Aye (said he) we are now in a civilized country.’”Bailey: “Possibly an exhibition of the ‘romantic humours’ of Dr. Roberson. . . . Dr. Alexander Carlyle [1722–1805] mentions Robertson’s horror of the hardened man who could coolly inspect a body hanging on the gallows.” Bailey references a passage from Carlyle’s Autobiography from G. B. Hill’s annotations in his edition of Boswell’s Life—see the Hill-Powell ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934–64), 3.335n1—but that passage is not really close to Boswell’s. Moreover, the Autobiography was begun in 1800 and not published until 1860. In the mid-nineteenth century several similar passages occur, all unfortunately lacking a source reference; e.g., “Having gone some distance up the River La Plata, they sailed southwards, and Drake, we are told, rejoiced to find that he was in a civilized country, for there was a gibbet on the coast, which Magellan had erected for a conspirator,” The National Readings Books, Book the Fourth (London [1867], 115. Drake’s discovery of Magellan’s gibbet was a part of the narrative of his “famous journey” from the beginning, but I have found none previous to or coincident with Boswell that expresses the irony of “civilized country.” On the other hand, there may have been a geographical irony in the story of Drake’s sighting of the gibbet where Magellan had executed a mutinous crewmember in 1520 and the capital punishment inflicted by Drake on his friend Sir Thomas Doughty in 1578 at the same site. “The Beheading of Captain Doughty by Drake,” an engraving by John June (fl. 1740–1770), depicts in the background Magellan’s gallows (See Fig. 1). I suspect Boswell was amalgamating in some way the Drake narrative with a more recent, overheard personal anecdote.No. 61 (Oct. 1782), 2.215—“There is no necessity for flattering a patron, and I admit that Flattery, as Laurentium Valla elegantly observes, ‘servile est non liberale et ingenuum—is the mark of a servile not of a liberal and ingenuous mind.’”Bailey glosses this fifteenth-century Italian scholar, listing three of his works, but admits, “I cannot trace Boswell’s quotation to its source.” The source, one of the three works referenced by Bailey, is De Elegantiis Latinae Linguae (c.1441), specifically, book 5, chapter 66. Boswell’s quotation matches exactly the passage in the 1548 ed., p. 391.No. 63 (Dec. 1782), 2.236—“And in the last poem of an anonymous collection, printed for Gillyflower in Westminster-Hall, 1694, I find the following couplet:Boswell is quoting from Innocui Sales. A Collection of New Epigrams, Vol. I (London, 1694), now credited to Henry Killigrew (1613–1700). It is the final couplet in “On Fungus,” a fourteen-line epigram that concludes the collection.No. 64 (Jan. 1783), 2.244—“And I own I always think with a pleasing regard of the mild reformer Melanchthon, who advised his aged mother to keep to the old religion.”Bailey notes Boswell’s use of the term “old religion” and a concomitant mention of this anecdote in the Life of Johnson, where Boswell quotes his letter to Johnson (30 Sept. 1764), written from the tomb of Melanchthon in Wittenberg. She properly sketches the issue of Boswell’s leanings toward Catholicism, certainly one point of the anecdote, which apparently was a locus classicus for ecumenical discussions. No specific source, therefore, is needed, but Boswell may have been reminded, or informed originally, of the anecdote by this treatment in Richard Rolt’s Lives of the Principal Reformers (London, 1759), p. 103: To Melanchthon’s mother’s question of what she must believe regarding contemporary religious disputes, her son replied, “‘Continue . . . to believe and pray as you have done hitherto, and never trouble yourself about controversies.’ This invincibly refutes the silly story . . . that when Melanchthon was at the point of death, his mother told him, he had persuaded her to embrace a religion that was different from that of her forefathers. But this is false relating to the mother; and it is certain that she died above thirty years before her son.”No. 67 (April 1783), 2.267—After quoting in Greek from Nemesius, Boswell provides a second epigraph as a translation—“Memory comprises the power of recollecting and storing up ideas”—which he credits to “Johnson.” Bailey’s note is one of her few outright blunders: “Unless it was turned off in some unrecorded conversation, this translation was not made by Dr. Samuel Johnson; neither can I find any Johnson to whom a translation of the whole work [i.e., Nemesius’ On Human Nature] is attributed.” She continues with “an unverified guess” that classical scholar Thomas Johnson is intended. Thanks to annotator emeritus Melvyn New for the discovery that Boswell surely had in mind the first definition of memory in Johnson’s Dictionary: “The power of retaining or recollecting things past; retention; reminiscence; recollection.”No. 68 (May 1783), 2.278—“I would be for compounding [Lucretius’] system with that of the Abbé du Bos, who accounts for our desire of seeing spectacles of cruelty from the universal wish that we all have to be moved; that is, to have our souls agitated.”Bailey remarked that Boswell’s observation “probably” came from Du Bos’s Critical Reflections (1719). I followed this lead in English Studies, but the specific passage I suggested there is not nearly so close as another passage in the same work that Paul Tankard subsequently discovered. Tankard was annotating an earlier essay by Boswell (Public Advertiser, 26 April 1768) that Boswell had recycled for this Hypochondriack essay. Cf. Thomas Nugent’s translation of Critical Reflections (1748): “That natural emotion, which rises, as it were, mechanically within us, upon seeing our fellow creatures in any great misfortune or danger, hath no other attractive, but that of being a passion, the motions whereof rouse and occupy the soul,” in Facts and Inventions: Selections from the Journalism of James Boswell, ed. Paul Tankard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 79n6.No. 68 (May 1783), 2.284—“But the best method [of public execution] I have ever discovered is one practised in Modern Rome, which is called ‘Macellare—to butcher.’ The criminal is placed upon a scaffold, and the executioner knocks him on the head with a great iron hammer, then cuts his throat with a large knife, and lastly, hews him in pieces with an ax; in short, treats him exactly like an ox in the shambles. The spectators are struck with prodigious terrour; yet the poor wretch who is stunned into insensibility by the blow, does not actually suffer much.”Boswell’s probable source is a passage, in German, by the Prussian traveler Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz (1741?–1812), here presented in a slightly later English translation (1791) by Joseph Trapp: “I saw a singular capital punishment, which the Romans describe as very ancient, and call it macellare. The delinquent is knocked on the head with a mace, the same as we kill certain cattle, which shortens both his anguish and torments, but is looked upon as the most disgraceful death.” For a detailed argument, see Robert G. Walker, “Boswell and Johann Wilhelm von Archenholz,” Eighteenth-Century Intelligencer, 25.3 (Oct. 2011), 1–3.No. 69 (June 1783), 2.286–287—“But when the proper notion of the Divinity came to be corrupted, and polytheism was introduced, swearing followed the fate of religion, ‘et si le monde fut tout surpris de se trouver rempli d’une multitude prodigieuse de dieux monstreux . . . ridicules’—And if the world was confounded to find itself filled with a prodigious multitude of monstrous gods, it was not less so to see itself as it were drowned in a deluge of ridiculous oaths.”Bailey writes, “The author was probably Guillaume Massieu (1665–1722).” Now this can be confirmed from an online text of Histoire de L’Academie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (Paris, 1717), 195; there Massieu is cited as the author of a “Dissertation sur les Serments des Anciens,” in which the passage appears.No. 69 (June 1783), 2.289—“The earliest acts against swearing which we find in this island were passed in Scotland in 1551. . . . Perhaps the ‘præfervidum ingenium Scotorum, the violent temper of the Scots’ made such a law necessary amongst them sooner than amongst the English.”The Latin tag was proverbial long before Boswell, sometimes thought to have originated with George Buchanan (1506–1582) in Rerum Scoticarum Historia (1582), xvi.41. As a Scot and a lawyer, Boswell would have been very familiar with the phrase, but perhaps it was further reinforced when it was employed by his father, one of five judges in the trial of Mungo Campbell. See “An Account of the famous Question in Scotland—Mungo Campbell accused of having murdered the late earl of Eglintoun,” London Magazine, 39 (March 1770), 147, for Lord Auchinleck’s speech, including,The deceased victim, Alexander Montgomerie, 10th Earl of Eglinton, was a neighbor of Lord Auchinleck and a friend of James Boswell himself. Unsurprisingly, Campbell was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, but he cheated the hangman with a suicide in his cell the night before.