To Be Continued

Latest installments of two monumental publishing projects, vastly different in subject matter and yet similar in their grandiose gusto for life, letters and history:

A HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES, VOL. II, THE NEW WORLD, by Winston S. Churchill (433 pp.; Dodd, Mead; $6), rolls with Churchillian eloquence over those troubled years between the first great Tudors. including Bloody Mary (the last Roman Catholic Queen of England), and the bloodless Revolution of 1688 (which established Britain in a truce of class, power and tradition). Churchill presents, with the terse clarity of one of his own state papers, an England emerging from the age of the first Elizabeth, when most Englishmen were sick of blood spilled over theological differences. They were to find that theology disguised as politics could be even bloodier. Churchill argues that ancient English liberties reposed in the monarch, the church and Parliament--but that Parliament, when it overthrew the others, could be a worse tyrant than either.

Thus, Oliver Cromwell, the hero to so many English historians, is Churchill's villain. He considers the Lord Protector - who, invoking God's will, ordered 3,000 men put to the sword in one day--a warning to all those who would be willing to kill others in order to improve the survivors. Says Churchill: "A school grew up to gape in awe and some in furtive admiration at these savage times . . . The twentieth century has sharply recalled its intellectuals from such vain indulgences."

In his story of England's Civil War, crowded with gaudy and eloquent figures of drama, squalor and nobility, Churchill has also been writing a neglected chapter in American history. His narrative takes U.S. schoolbook history a generation back from where it usually starts. His brilliant sketch of turbulent 17th century England explains just how the Puritans on the run, gentlemen adventurers and refugees got their start in the New World, and what they had in mind when they touched American soil.

BOSWELL IN SEARCH OF A WIFE, edited by Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (390 pp.; McGraw-Hill; $6), is Volume VI of the Boswell Papers being brought out by a Yale task force of scholars. It follows young Boswell (he had not yet written his Life of Samuel Johnson) through three years (1766-69) while he was trying to find a wife rich enough to make him a wealthy man, beautiful enough to make him a happy man, pious enough to make him a good man. "Bozzy's" solemn efforts to fill this tall order make scandalously funny reading. He was already the father of a bastard son (who died in infancy), and now a second child was on the way as a result of his "licentious passion" for one Mrs. Dodds (a "sweet little mistress . . . admirably formed for amorous dalliance" --but "she debases my dignity" and "costs me a great deal of money").

Just as Mrs. Dodds was about to give birth, Boswell met the very heiress he was looking for--Miss Catherine Blair, "the finest woman I have ever seen." Overjoyed, Bozzy rushed off to drink Miss Blair's health, got very tight and passed the night with "a whore worthy of Boswell if Boswell must have a whore." As "a just retribution for my licentiousness," he "got a disease from which I suffer severely."

Having made no headway with the angelic Miss Blair (she allowed him to press his hand upon her waist during a performance of Othello, but that was all), he consoled himself with a young Irish lady just 16--"formed like a Grecian nymph . . . her father with an estate of -L-1,000 a year and above -L-10,000 in ready money. Upon my honour, I never was so much in love." When Bozzy set off to Ireland to make a formal bid for the nymph, he took with him his favorite cousin, Margaret Montgomerie. Sweet Peggy acted as his counselor--and kibitzed so cutely that Bozzy forgot the object of his journey and proposed to Peggy instead. Their marriage contract bore the stern signature "Sam. Johnson. Witness."

Gaps and erasures in Bozzy's papers have been filled in by the remorselessly scholarly Yale editors, so that this volume contains many a fine but familiar chunk from the Life of Johnson. But outrageous Bozzy holds the stage today, possibly because he often seems in tune with psychoanalysis. Inspired by Jean Jacques Rousseau's dedicated frankness, Bozzy deemed it "fine to be sensible of all one's various sentiments and to analyze them." This meant that, like many self-analysts? he shamelessly dredged up his vices but coyly concealed most of his virtues. And yet, in fact, he was a generous friend, a highly intelligent observer, and an independent thinker--not all his awe of Dr. Johnson, for example, could convince him that the great man was right in saying that swallows passed the winter buried in heaps at the bottom of river beds.*

* A notion first advanced by Aristotle, whose views on natural history were regarded as gospel for ten centuries.

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