Methinks Boswell and Gibbons found words as plenty as blackberries long before Windows and MACs. Neither was handicapped by primative technology. Boswell didn't wait a long time for Sammy J. to be witty. They spent less than two years together in total, including the trip through Scotland. Since they didn't have TV, Johnson had worked and reworked his sayings on lantern lit tavern audiences long before Boswell arrived. Very quotable, the good doctor J.

Boswell wrote volumes of diaries. It's all in his diaries. Every time Johnson insulted him, Boswell jotted it down as faithfully as he could. Eddy Gibbons belonged to Johnson's literary club. Johnson recommended Boswell to the club saying that 'Boswell was a clubable fellow.' Perhaps Gibbons was honouring Boswell when he started The Decline with a joke about Scotland - about part in the north of England to uncivilized for the Romans to bother conquering.

Boswell had an interesting life without e-mail. Johnson would lecture Boswell on piety. Boswell would take a break to check the prostitute he'd been with the night-before's for VD, not find her, and decide to try another. Boswell would challenge someone to a duel, then realize that he didn't want to die, then find a way to weasel out of the duel. He witnessed riots in an English town against a law prohibiting throwing stones at birds on Sunday. He rode on carriages driven at full speed through robber infested highways. Yeah, Boswell had a life. Read his diaries.

I don't know if Boswell suffered from venereal vulnerabilities but Gibbons died a few days after a doctor lanced a huge cyst on his testicles.