William Johnson Temple (also Johnstone) (1739–1796) was an English cleric and essayist, now remembered as a correspondent of James Boswell.
He was a fellow-student at the University of Edinburgh with James Boswell, in the class of Robert Hunter, Professor of Greek.
[1] His father became bankrupt towards the close of 1763, and Temple contributed to him from the proceeds of the small estate which he had inherited from his mother.
Next day, on the presentation of Wilmot Vaughan, 4th Viscount Lisburne, whose family were connected with Berwick-on-Tweed, he was instituted to the rectory of Mamhead, adjoining Starcross, about ten miles from Exeter.
[1] By August 1767 Temple was married, to a lady with a fortune of £1,300, but the following year, after the bankruptcy of Fenwick Stow, he was again in financial trouble.
After proceeding to Northumberland on this business, he visited Boswell at Chessel's Buildings, Canongate, Edinburgh (September 1770).
[1] During a visit to London in May 1773 Temple dined at the house of Charles and Edward Dilly, the publishers in The Poultry, meeting Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Bennet Langton, Boswell, and others; and in April 1775 Boswell paid him a visit at Mamhead.
In the meantime Temple published his first essay (1774); Bishop Keppel made him his chaplain, and by November 1775 he had received the promise of another living, St Gluvias with the chapelry of Budock.
[6] He did not at all share Boswell's adulation of Johnson, and in literary terms was more an ally of Gray and Horace Walpole.
In politics he held radical reforming views, until late in life these were shaken by the outcomes of the French Revolution.
[13] A character of Thomas Gray was written by Temple in a letter to Boswell a short time after the poet's death (30 July 1771), and was published by him without permission in the London Magazine for 1772.