Laudator Temporis Acti

I've just been rereading this morning Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica and France 1765-66 (London: Heineman, 1955). From Naples on March 2nd 1765, he writes a letter to John Wilkes in Latin:

...Latinam linguam scribere haud assuetus, tamen in hac regione classica experiri volui. Excusas et valeas. (p. 56)

'Haud assuetus' he might have been, but to qualify as an advocate in Edinburgh the following year he would write a thesis in Latin on the 'Legacies of Household Furniture'.

In Rome, two weeks later, B. is on the Palatine:

Struck by these famous places, I was seized with enthusuasm. I began to speak Latin. Mr Morison* replied. He laughed a bit at the beginning. But we made a resolution to speak Latin continually during this course of antiquities. We have persisted, and every day we speak with greater facility, so that we have harangued on Roman antiquities in the language of the Romans themselves. (p. 65)

* Colin Morison, a Jacobite refugee and guide (p. 54 n. 3)