James Boswell (1778–1822)

He was from an early age close to his father's friend Edmond Malone, whom he assisted in collecting and arranging the materials for a second edition of his The Plays and Poems of William Shakespeare, and was requested by him in his last illness to complete it, a task which he duly performed.

One of the earliest members of the Roxburghe Club, he presented to it in 1816 a facsimile reprint of the poems of Richard Barnfield, and in 1817 A Roxburgh Garland, which consists of a few bacchanalian songs by seventeenth-century poets, and of which "L'Envoi", a convivial lyric in honour of the club, was composed by himself.

Boswell contributed a long preliminary "advertisement", various readings and notes of no great importance, with the completion of Malone's "Essay on the Phraseology and Metre of Shakespeare" and the Glossarial Index.

Boswell died suddenly at his chambers in the Temple, unmarried and apparently in embarrassed circumstances, on 24 February 1822.

He died a few weeks before the death, in a duel, of his brother Sir Alexander, who in a poetical tribute to his memory said of him that he had "never lost one friend or found one foe".