An Ebony Box

Down a gangplank to Manhattan last week there strode a youngish man carrying a suitcase. He-- Col. Ralph Isham, book collector, Boswellian, millionaire--was not surprised to find reporters crowding around him on his arrival from England. In his little suitcase he had some old pages, scrawled over in a faint curlicue handwriting, which he had recently purchased. These old pages, now bound into heavy leather volumes each stamped with the Scottish crest, were old letters and manuscripts, mostly unpublished, mostly written in the thin legible penmanship of James Boswell (1740-95).

The Box. More than 150 years ago a silly young Scotsman came to London. The two salient qualities of his mind were enthusiasm and an insatiable, embarrassing curiosity. Soon he came to worship at a popular shrine of which the idol was a fat, brilliant, untidy person, a rude and witty talker, a man of letters and a genius--Samuel Johnson. For many, this grotesque icon had lost his potency by the time he died. Not so for James Boswell, who bequeathed to the world two important things: one, The Life of Samuel Johnson, a monument to the curiosity of the author and the conversation of the subject, admittedly the best biography in the world; the other a chest made of ebony, which was almost six feet long and stood five feet high on slim legs. Letters Boswell had received, letters he had written, notes and diaries and An Account of Corsica filled the chest.

For a long time this cabinet was lost. Then one day James Boswell's great-great-grandson, James Boswell Talbot, Sixth Baron Talbot de Malahide, visited his Scottish estates, the Castle of Auchinleck. Rummaging in a closet, his hand found a peculiar trunklike cabinet, made of a dark and heavy wood. In its drawers and cubbyholes there were a lot of old papers, so soft they made no noise when Lord Talbot shuffled them together and lifted them out of the box. Very gently, burning with excitement as if he had been touching gold, Lord Talbot laid them on a desk. Then he began to read slowly, the words his great-great-grandfather had written so long ago. Corsica, land of hot skies and almost savage peasants, lifted its little mountains on the moors beyond the window. Famous and courtly figures, so long kenneled in their small dark house, peered over the shoulder of the reader; he saw them but his eyes continued their hesitating journey from left to right over the pages that were like a thin maze. A fashionable lady bowed at his elbow; Voltaire took snuff and made a face behind him. At last James Boswell Talbot gathered his ancestor's writings and put them back into the ebony box.

When he returned to his Malahide Castle in Ireland, Lord Talbot took the little box with him. At Malahide, not long ago, he entertained a friend, one Col. Ralph Isham, who, when he left Ireland, took with him in a suitcase the papers which had once been in the ebony box. The box, now like an old and honored castle made unfit by time for habitation, stayed at Malahide.

The Contents. When he arrived in Manhattan, Colonel Isham re fused to divulge the price he had paid for the contents of his suit case. He admitted that to secure them had been difficult because Lord Talbot had viewed the old let ters as a peculiarly private account of his great-great-grandfather's charms and indiscretions rather than as an important literary discovery. Successful where other collectors had failed, Colonel Isham took the suitcase to the safe-deposit vaults of the Guaranty Trust Co. where, in an ivory twilight that smelled of oil and steel, he showed all his treasure to hungry newsgatherers.

First, there were 30 pages of the manuscript of the Life. These had not been closed in the ebony trunk, but had, since the death of Boswell, reposed in a Scottish garret where the air was as damp as oatmeal. When Lord Talbot stooped to gather this sheaf of merry memories, the bundle had crumbled in his hand into a little flutter of yellowish flakes. Only 30 pages could be gathered again. These, a gay jumble of antique anecdotes, had been joined and backed with gauze so that they might last perhaps forever. The manuscript of An Account of Corsica had been preserved intact, as had letters from Boswell to his wife, to his sons, to William Pitt, to William Temple, to Edmund Burke, to Edmund Malone, to Isabella de Zuylen ("Zelide"), to Samuel Johnson.

Most precious of all the letters were the two in which Boswell had asked Margaret Montgomerie to marry him and in which she agreed to do so. Colonel Isham, chattering with excitement, displayed in an alley between boxes of steel, not ebony, the placid sentimentalities of two charming people. In this strange place he read aloud Boswell's "Read this in your own room and think as long as you please. Only let me have a positive answer as I am quite dependent on you. ... I would share a kingdom with you if I had it. . . ." Peggy, who later watched her husband chasing every young woman he met, who heard true rumors about his three bastards, wrote back briefly, beautifully, to tell Jimmy Boswell that she would marry him.

Only for a short time will the papers repose in a steel vault. At Glen Head, L. I., where he lives, Colonel Isham has ordered a fireproof room to be built where the relics may be kept. There he will prepare them for publication, probably with the help of Professor Chauncy Brewster Tinker, Yale authority on Boswell; perhaps also with the help of Geoffrey Scott, biographer of "Zelide" and translator of her stories. After publication the papers will be occasionally open to view, that scholars who wish to scrutinize the actual writing of a vain, foolish, careful, idolatrous and preposterous genius, may do so.

The Significance. Called by some "the most important literary find of the century," these papers alone probably surpass any other existing collection of Boswelliana, of which the finest hitherto have been those owned by Robert B. Adam, Buffalo (N. Y.) collector, and by Alfred Edward Newton of Philadelphia. The value of the collection varies widely in different estimates. It is insured for about $100,000; experts agree that on the market it would bring from $20,000 to $150,000. But to Boswellians and students of 18th Century letters, these documents are undoubtedly beyond price.