This is the first of two volumes collecting the letters of James Boswell and the friend who knew him longer and more intimately than any other, William Johnson Temple (1739-1796), clergyman and essayist. Meeting as university students at Edinburgh in 1755, Boswell and Temple began a lively, affectionate, and intellectual relationship. Their lifelong correspondence reveals not only their intimate thoughts, hopes, ambitions, and family news but also their running debates on many of the later eighteenth century's most enduring political, social, and doctrinal controversies.