Born, at Auchinleck, 29 Oct. 1740. Educated by private tutor; then at private school in Edinburgh; then at Edinburgh High School and Edinburgh Univ. To Glasgow as Student of Civil Law, 8 Jan. 1759. To London, March 1760. In Edinburgh, April, 1761 to Nov. 1762; then returned to London. Contrib. poems to “Collections of Original Poems by Mr. Blacklock,” 1762. First met Johnson, 16 May 1763. In Berlin, July 1764. To Italy, Dec. 1764. To Utrecht, to study Law, Aug. 1765. Tour in Italy and Corsica. Returned to Scotland, Feb. 1766. Admitted Advocate, 26 July 1766. To London on publication of “Account of Corsica,” May 1768. Married Margaret Montgomerie, 25 Nov. 1769. Contrib. to “London Magazine,” 1769–70, 1777–79. Frequent visits to Johnson, mostly in London, between 1772 and 1784. Elected Member of Literary Club, 30 April 1773. Voyage to Hebrides with Johnson, Aug. to Nov. 1773. Began to keep terms at Inner Temple, 1775. Auchinleck estate entailed on him, 7 Aug. 1776. Father died, 30 Aug. 1782. Called to Bar, 1786. Appointed Recorder of Carlisle, 1788. Took chambers in Temple, 1790. “Life of Johnson” appeared, 16 May 1791. Appointed Secretary of Foreign Correspondence to Royal Academy, July, 1791. Died, in London, 19 May 1795. Buried at Auchinleck. Works: “Ode to Tragedy” (anon.), 1761; “Elegy upon the Death of an amiable Young Lady” (anon.), 1761; “The Cub at Newmarket” (anon.), 1762; “Correspondence with Hon. A. Erskine,” 1763; “Critical Strictures on Mallet’s ‘Elvira’” (with Erskine and Dempster), 1763; “Speeches, Arguments and Determinations” in the Douglas case (anon.), 1767; “Essence of the Douglas Cause” (anon.), 1767; “Dorando,” 1767; Prologue for the Opening of Edinburgh Theatre, 1767; “An Account of Corsica,” 1768; “British Essays in favour of the Brave Corsicans,” 1769; “Decision in the Cause of Hunter v. Donaldson,” 1774; “A Letter to the People of Scotland on the Present State of the Nation,” 1783; “Ode by Samuel Johnson to Mrs. Thrale” (by Boswell; anon.), 1784; “The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides,” 1785 (2nd ed. same year); “Letter to the People of Scotland on the alarming Attempt to infringe the Articles of Union,” 1786; “The Celebrated Letter from Samuel Johnson, LL.D., to Phillip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield,” 1790; “Conversation between George III. and Samuel Johnson,” 1790; “No Abolition of Slavery” (probably suppressed), 1791; “Life of Johnson,” 1791; (another edn., pirated, 1792; 2nd authorised edn., 1793); “Principal Corrections and Additions to First Edition,” 1793. Posthumous: “Letters to Rev. J. W. Temple,” 1857; “Boswelliana: the Common-place Book of J. Boswell,” published by Grampian Club, 1874.

Personal

  I have just seen a very clever letter to Mrs. Montagu, to disavow a jackanapes who has lately made a noise here, one Boswell, by anecdotes of Dr. Johnson.

  I fancy Boswell, from some things I heard of him, and it seems confirmed by various passages in his “Life of Johnson,” has a sort of rage for knowing all sorts of public men, good, bad, and indifferent, all one if a man renders himself known he likes to be acquainted with him.

  I loved the man; he had great convivial powers and an inexhaustible fund of good humour in society; no body could detail the spirit of a conversation in the true style and character of the parties more happily than my friend James Boswell, especially when his vivacity was excited, and his heart exhilarated by the circulation of the glass, and the grateful odour of a well-broiled lobster.

  Of those who were frequently at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s parties, Mr. Boswell was very acceptable to him. He was a man of excellent temper, and with much gaiety of manner, possessed a shrewd understanding, and close observation of character. He had a happy faculty of dissipating that reserve, which too often damps the pleasure of English society. His good-nature and social feeling always inclined him to endeavour to produce that effect; which was so well known, that when he appeared, he was hailed as the harbinger of festivity. Sir Joshua was never more happy than when, on such occasions, Mr. Boswell was seated within his hearing. The Royal Society gratified Sir Joshua by electing Mr. Boswell their Secretary of Foreign Correspondence; which made him an Honorary Member of that body.

  With the usual ill hap of those who deal in mauvaise plaisanterie, old Bozzy was often in the unpleasant situation of retreating from expressions, which could not be defended. He was always labouring at notoriety, and, having failed in attracting it in his own person, he hooked his little bark to them whom he thought most likely to leave harbour, and so shine with reflected light, like the rat that eat the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

  He united lively manners with indefatigable diligence, and the volatile curiosity of a man about town with the drudging patience of a chronicler. With a very good opinion of himself, he was quick in discerning, and frank in applauding, the excellencies of others. Though proud of his own name and lineage, and ambitious of the countenance of the great, he was yet so cordial an admirer of merit, wherever found, that much public ridicule, and something like contempt, were excited by the modest assurance with which he pressed his acquaintance on all the notorieties of his time, and by the ostentatious (but, in the main, laudable) assiduity with which he attended the exile Paoli and the low-born Johnson! These were amiable, and, for us, fortunate inconsistencies. His contemporaries indeed, not without some colour of reason, occasionally complained of him as vain, inquisitive, troublesome, and giddy; but his vanity was inoffensive—his curiosity was commonly directed towards laudable objects—when he meddled, he did so, generally, from good-natured motives—and his giddiness was only an exuberant gaiety, which never failed in the respect and reverence due to literature, morals, and religion; and posterity gratefully acknowledges the taste, temper, and talents with which he selected, enjoyed, and described that polished and intellectual society which still lives in his work, and without his work had perished.

  He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account, or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality, by not having been alive when the Dunciad was written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon…. Servile and impertinent—shallow and pedantic—a bigot and a sot—bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London—so curious to know everybody who was talked about, that, Tory and High Churchman as he was, he manœuvered, we have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine…. All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all the hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill, but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself.

  In that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over his weaker fellow-creatures, partly to snuff up the smell of coming pleasure, and scent it from afar; in those bag-cheeks, hanging like half-filled wineskins, still able to contain more; in that coarsely-protruded shelf-mouth, that fat dew-lapped chin; in all this, who sees not sensuality, pretension, boisterous imbecility enough; much that could not have been ornamental in the temper of a great man’s overfed great man (what the Scotch name flunky), though it had been more natural there? The under part of Boswell’s face is of a low, almost brutish character.

  “Who is this Scotch cur at Johnson’s heels?” asked some one, amazed at the sudden intimacy. “He is not a cur,” answered Goldsmith; “You are too severe. He is only a bur. Tom Davies flung him at Johnson in sport, and he has the faculty of sticking.”

  He [Carlyle] rescued poor Boswell from the unmerited obloquy of an ungrateful generation, and taught us to see something half-comically beautiful in the poor, weak creature, with his pathetic instinct of reverence for what was nobler, wiser, and stronger than himself.

  Matching his vanity was his love for wine and his admiration of the other sex. This latter was a terrible failing, and brings him fairly within our list of lovers. Some years ago were published the Boswell–Temple letters, as to whose genuineness there arose a controversy. As to this point there can be no question now. These were said to be found, under rather suspicious circumstances, in a shop at Boulogne, wrapping up articles. This conventional shape of introduction for spurious papers might excite reasonable doubts; but since their publication they have been traced with reasonable exactness from hand to hand to France. In these we have all his amatory raptures set out with charming candour. He began when he was only eighteen, and before he had left Edinburgh he began his amatory course, which corresponded not a little, both in tone and finale, with that of Mr. Sterne.

  Boswell’s tastes, however, were by no means limited to sensual or frivolous enjoyments. His appreciation of the bottle was combined with an equally hearty sensibility to more intellectual pleasures. He had not a spark of philosophic or poetic power, but within the ordinary range of such topics as can be discussed at a dinner-party, he had an abundant share of liveliness and intelligence. His palate was as keen for good talk as for good wine. He was an admirable recipient, if not an originator, of shrewd or humorous remarks upon life and manners. What in regard to sensual enjoyment was mere gluttony, appeared in higher matters as an insatiable curiosity.

  “Ambitious Thane,” “The Bear-Leader,” “Bozzy,” “Corsica Boswell,” “Curious Scrapmonger,” “Dapper Jemmy,” “A Feather in the Scale,” “Thou Jackall,” “Lazarus,” “Will-o’-th’-Wisp.”

  It is peevish to refuse credit to those who do things admirably well, because there is something incomprehensible in their capacity. Those who think that James Boswell was a vain and shallow coxcomb of mediocre abilities, without intellectual gifts of any eminence, are confronted with the fact that this supposed fool was the unaided author of two of the most graphic and most readable works which the eighteenth century has left us. It is right that Boswell’s claim to a high independent place in literature should be vindicated, and the fact is that, after Burke and Goldsmith, he is by far the most considerable of the literary companions of Johnson. That he has risen into fame on the shoulders of that great man is true, but the fact has been insisted upon until his own genuine and peculiar merits have been most unduly overlooked.

  What a wonderful fellow was James Boswell.

  “Love,” wrote Madame de Staël, “is with man a thing apart, ’tis woman’s whole existence.” This is not true at least of Boswell, for his love affairs fill as large a part in his life as in that of Benjamin Constant. A most confused chapter withal, and one that luckily was not known to Macaulay, whose colours would otherwise have been more brilliant. We find Bozzy paying his addresses at one and the same time to at least eight ladies, exclusive as this is of sundry minor divinities of a fleeting and more temporary nature not calling here for allusion.

  That this garrulous, vain, wine-bibbing tattler should ally himself with the great moralist, may be explained by his love of notoriety and of notables; but that the austere, intolerant veteran of letters should like—indeed love such a companion, is a curious problem. Yet, moralist though he was, he liked, as he said, to “frisk it” now and then,—he loved the Honourable Tom Hervey, the rake, and Topham Beauclerc, whose morals were far to seek. Boswell, though not learned, and needing his mentor’s advice to “read more and drink less,” knew something of his letters, knew much of the world, was clever, entertaining, good-natured, and loyal…. Meanwhile his wife, a woman of sense and some wit, had much to endure—her society neglected for “good company,” where he got tipsy, with the usual sequels of fits of depression and tearful sentiment. He reminds us of Sir Richard Steele with his bibulous indulgence, and protestations of affection in notelets to his much suffering spouse: “I am, dear Prue, a little in drink, but all the time your faithful husband, Richard Steele.” All his characteristics remained unchanged; his alternate hypochondria and joviality; his moods of piety and his lapses from it; his superstitions; his love of excitement—especially for a hanging, in which he was as keen a connoisseur as George Selwyn himself. He was ready to kneel down and join in the chaplain’s prayers in the prison cells with the convict in profoundest devotion, and to see him turned off at Tyburn with the greatest gusto,—to witness fifteen men hanged at once filled him with the keenest pleasure and the finest moral reflections. Vain as poor Goldsmith, whose pride in his plum-coloured coat from Filbey’s he laughed at, he would rush in his Court dress from a levee at St. James’s to dazzle compositors at the printing-offices with his magnificence. Few figures were better known in London artistic and literary society than his—paunchy and puffy, with red face, long, cocked nose, protuberant mouth and chin, with mock solemnity of manner and voice, with slow gait and slovenly dress—the clothes being loose, the wig untidy, the gestures restless so as to resemble his great master, of whom he incessantly spoke, and whose big manner and oddities he mimicked with infinite drollery, making listeners convulse with laughter at the exquisite, but irreverent copy of his “revered friend.”

  Of the kind of man Boswell was he himself has given us the most abundant evidence. His pages are autobiographic in their self-delineation. We see his extraordinary want of tact; his amazing folly, egotism, self-obtrusion, and excessive freedom of manners; his want of self-respect, amounting almost to self-debasement (he did not hesitate to liken himself to a dog); his conceit, vanity, absurd pomposity, and serene self-complacency. He was easily enamored, and was no Moslem when the wine was circulating; for he frequently succumbed to the material good things, and admits that he was unable to recollect the intellectual good things that flowed around him.

An Account of Corsica, 1768

  Jamie had taen a toot on a new horn.

  Mr. Boswell’s book I was going to recommend to you, when I received your letter: it has pleased and moved me strangely, all (I mean) that relates to Paoli. He is a man born two thousand years after his time! The pamphlet proves what I have always maintained, that any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity. Of Mr. Boswell’s truth I have not the least suspicion, because I am sure he could not invent nothing of this kind. The true title of this part of his work is, a Dialogue between a Green-Goose and a Hero.

  He came to my country, and he fetched me some letter of recommending him; but I was of the belief he might be an impostor, and I supposed in my minte he was espy; for I look away from him, and in a moment I look to him again, and I behold his tablets. Oh! he was to the work of writing down all I say. Indeed I was angry. But soon I discover he was no impostor and no espy; and I only find I was myself the monster he had come to discern. Oh! he is a very good man; I love him indeed; so cheerful, so gay, so pleasant! but at the first, oh! I was indeed angry.

  The personal part of which is far better written than the hasty critic is wont to acknowledge.

  Mrs. Barbauld regarded him as no ordinary traveller, with

	“Working thoughts which swelled the breast
	Of generous Boswell, when with noble aim
	And views beyond the narrow beaten track
	By trivial fancy trod, he turned his course
	From polished Gallia’s soft delicious vales.”

Such thoughts were perhaps really foreign to that traveller, yet Dr. Hill assures us that by every Corsican of education the name of Boswell is known and honoured. One curious circumstance is given. At Pino, when Boswell fancying himself “in a publick house” or inn, had called for things, the hostess had said una cosa dopo un altra, signore, “one thing after another, sir.” This has lingered as a memento of Bozzy in Corsica, and has been found by Dr. Hill to be preserved among the traditions in the Tomasi family. Translations of the book in Italian, Dutch, French, and German, spread abroad the name of the traveller who, if like a prophet without honour in his own country, has not been without it elsewhere.

Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, 1785

	O Boswell, Bozzy, Bruce, whate’er thy name,
	Thou mighty shark for anecdote and fame.
	*        *        *        *        *
	Triumphant, thou through Time’s vast gulf shalt sail,
	The pilot of our literary whale….
	Thou, curious scrapmonger, shalt live in song,
	When death has still’d the rattle of thy tongue;
	Ev’n future babes to lisp thy name shall learn,
	And Bozzy join with Wood and Tommy Hearn,
	Who drove the spiders from much prose and rhime,
	And snatch’d old stories from the jaws of time….
	What tasteless mouth can gape, what eye can close,
	What head can nod, o’er thy enlivening prose?…
	Yes! whilst the Rambler shall a comet blaze,
	And gild a world of darkness with his rays,
	Thee, too, that world with wonderment, shall hail,
	A lively, bouncing cracker at his tail!

  I return you many thanks for Boswell’s Tour. I read it to Mrs. Unwin after supper, and we find it amusing. There is much trash in it, as there must always be in every narrative that relates indiscriminately all that passed. But now and then the Doctor speaks like an oracle, and that makes amends for all. Sir John was a coxcomb, and Boswell is not less a coxcomb, though of another kind.

  In my “Tour,” I was almost unboundedly open in my communications, and from my eagerness to display the wonderful fertility and readiness of Johnson’s wit, freely showed to the world its dexterity, even when I was myself the object of it. I trusted that I should be liberally understood; as knowing very well what I was about, and by no means as simply unconscious of the pointed effects of the satire. I own, indeed, that I was arrogant enough to suppose that the tenour of the rest of the book would sufficiently guard me against such a strange imputation. But it seems I judged too well of the world; for, though I could scarcely believe it, I have been undoubtedly informed, that many persons, especially in distant quarters, not penetrating enough into Johnson’s character, so as to understand his mode of treating his friends, have arraigned my judgment, instead of seeing that I was sensible of all that they could observe. It is related of the great Dr. Clarke, that when, in one of his leisure hours, he was unbending himself with a few friends in the most playful and frolicsome manner, he observed Beau Nash approaching; upon which he suddenly stopped:—“My boys,” said he, “let us be grave; here comes a fool.” The world, my friend, I have found to be a great fool as to that particular on which it has become necessary to speak very plainly.

  Never, I think, was so unimportant a journey so known of men. Every smart boy in every American school, knows now what puddings he ate, and about the cudgel that he carried, and the boiled mutton that was set before him. The bare mention of these things brings back a relishy smack of the whole story of the journey. Is it for the literary quality of the book which describes it? Is it for our interest in the great, nettlesome, ponderous traveller; or is it by reason of a sneaking fondness we all have for the perennial stream of Boswell’s gossip? I cannot tell, for one: I do not puzzle with the question; but I enjoy.

  No better book of travels in Scotland has ever been written than Boswell’s “Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.” The accuracy of his description, his eye for scenes and dramatic effects, have all been fully borne witness to by those who have followed in their track, and the fact of the book being day by day read by Johnson, during its preparation, gives it an additional value from the perfect veracity of its contents—“as I have resolved that the very journal which Dr. Johnson read shall be presented to the publick, I will not expand the text in any considerable degree.”

Life of Johnson, 1791–93

  Boswell tells me he is printing anecdotes of Johnson, not his life, but, as he has the vanity to call it, his pyramid. I besought his tenderness for our virtuous and most revered departed friend, and begged he would mitigate some of his asperities. He said, roughly, “He would not cut off his claws, nor make a tiger a cat, to please anybody.” It will, I doubt not, be a very amusing book, but I hope not an indiscreet one; he has great enthusiasm, and some fire.

  Boswell’s book will be curious, or at least whimsical; his hero, who can so long detain the public curiosity, must be no common animal.

  The labour and anxious attention with which I have collected and arranged the materials of which these volumes are composed, will hardly be conceived by those who read them with careless felicity. The stretch of mind and prompt assiduity by which so many conversations were preserved, I myself, at some distance of time, contemplate with wonder; and I must be allowed to suggest that the nature of the work in other respects, as it consists of innumerable detached particulars, all which, even the most minute, I have spared no pains to ascertain with a scrupulous authenticity, has occasioned a degree of trouble far beyond that of any other species of composition. Were I to detail the books which I have consulted, and the inquiries which I have found it necessary to make by various channels, I should probably be thought ridiculously ostentatious. Let me only observe, as a specimen of my trouble, that I have sometimes been obliged to run half over London, in order to fix a date correctly; which, when I had accomplished I well knew would obtain me no praise, though a failure would have been to my discredit. And after all, perhaps, hard as it may be, I shall not be surprised if omissions or mistakes be pointed out with invidious severity. I have also been extremely careful as to the exactness of my quotations; holding that there is a respect due to the public, which should oblige every author to attend to this, and never to presume to introduce them with, “I think I have read,” or, “If I remember right,” when the originals may be examined.

  Boswell has at last published his long-promised “Life of Dr. Johnson,” in two volumes in quarto. I will give you an account of it when I have gone through it. I have already perceived, that in writing the history of Hudibras, Ralpho has not forgot himself—nor will others, I believe, forget him!

  Highly as this work is now estimated, it will, I am confident, be still more valued by posterity a century hence, when the excellent and extraordinary man, whose wit and wisdom are here recorded, shall be viewed at a still greater distance; and the instruction and entertainment they afford will at once produce reverential gratitude, admiration, and delight.

  The circle of Mr. Boswell’s acquaintance among the learned, the witty, and indeed among men of all ranks and professions, was extremely extensive, as his talents were considerable, and his convivial powers made his company much in request. His warmth of heart towards his friends, was very great; and I have known few men who possessed a stronger sense of piety, or more fervent devotion (tinctured, no doubt, with some little share of superstition which had, probably in some degree, been fostered by his habits of intimacy with Dr. Johnson), perhaps not always sufficient to regulate his imagination, or direct his conduct, yet still genuine, and founded both in his understanding and his heart. His “Life” of that extraordinary man, with all the faults with which it has been charged, must be allowed to be one of the most characteristic and entertaining biographical works in the English language.

  His “Life of Samuel Johnson” exhibits a striking likeness of a confident, overweening, dictatorial pedant, though of parts and learning; and of a weak, shallow, submissive admirer of such a character, deriving a vanity from that very admiration.

  Boswell was probably an inferior man to Spence;—but he was a far better collector of anecdotes, and the very prince, indeed, of retail wits and philosophers; so that, with all possible sense of the value of what he has done, we sometimes can hardly help wishing that he had lived in the time of Pope, instead of our own.

  Considering the eminent persons to whom it relates, the quantity of miscellaneous information and entertaining gossip which it brings together, may be termed, without exception, the best parlour-window book that ever was written.

  I now approach, with a keen recollection of the pleasure which, in common with every tolerably well-educated Englishman, I have felt, and shall continue to my very latest hour to feel, in the perusal of it—the Biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson, by James Boswell, his companion, his chronicler, and his friend. This fascinating, and I may add truly original, composition, is a work for all times. In reading it, we see the man—“Vir ipse.”…

“Sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat.”

We even hear his voice, and observe his gesticulations. The growth of discontent and the shout of triumph equally pervades our ears. Walking, sitting, reading, writing, talking, all is Johnsonian. Such another piece of domestic painting, in black and white, is, perhaps, no where to be seen. We place Boswell’s Johnson in our libraries, as an enthusiast hangs up his Gerard Dow in his cabinet—to be gazed at again and again; to feed upon, and to devour.

  Of above twenty years, therefore, that their acquaintance lasted, periods equivalent in the whole to about three-quarters of a year only, fell under the personal notice of Boswell…. It appears from the Life, that Mr. Boswell visited England a dozen times during his acquaintance with Dr. Johnson, and that the number of days on which they met were about 180, to which is to be added the time of the Tour, during which they met daily from the 18th August, to the 22d November, 1773; in the whole about 276 days. The number of pages in the separate editions of the two works is 2528, of which 1320 are occupied by the history of these 276 days; so that a little less than an hundredth part of Dr. Johnson’s life occupies above one-half of Mr. Boswell’s works. Every one must regret that his personal intercourse with his great friend was not more frequent or more continued.

  “The Life of Johnson” is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakspeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly, that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere. We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived; and he has beaten them all.

  Out of the fifteen millions that then lived, and had bed and board in the British Islands, this man has provided us a greater pleasure than any other individual, at whose cost we now enjoy ourselves; perhaps has done us a greater service than can be specially attributed to more than two or three: yet, ungrateful that we are, no written or spoken eulogy of James Boswell anywhere exists; his recompense as solid pudding (so far as copyright went) was not excessive; and as for the empty praise, it has altogether been denied him. Men are unwiser than children; they do not know the hand that feeds them…. As for the Book itself, questionless the universal favour entertained for it is well merited. In worth as a Book we have rated it beyond any other product of the eighteenth century: all Johnson’s own Writings, laborious and in their kind genuine above most, stand on a quite inferior level to it; already, indeed, they are becoming obsolete for this generation; and for some future generation may be valuable chiefly as Prolegomena and expository Scholia to this Johnsoniad of Boswell. Which of us but remembers, as one of the sunny spots in his existence, the day when he opened these airy volumes, fascinating him by a true natural magic! It was as if the curtains of the Past were drawn aside, and we look mysteriously into a kindred country, where dwelt our Fathers; inexpressibly dear to us, but which had seemed forever hidden from our eyes.

  Do you know our English “Boswell’s Life of Johnson?” If not, read it. There are not ten books of the eighteenth century so valuable.

  Really, the ambition of the man to illustrate his mental insignificance, by continually placing himself in juxtaposition with the great lexicographer, has something in it perfectly ludicrous. Never, since the days of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, has there been presented to the world a more whimsically contrasted pair of associates than Johnson and Boswell.

  Content not only to be called, by the object of his veneration, a dunce, a parasite, a coxcomb, an eavesdropper, and a fool, but even faithfully to report what he calls the “keen sarcastic wit,” the “variety of degrading images,” the “rudeness,” and the “ferocity,” of which he was made the special object: bent all the more firmly upon the one design which seized and occupied the whole of such faculties as he possessed, and living in such a manner to achieve it as to have made himself immortal as his hero. “You have but two topics, sir,” exclaimed Johnson; “yourself and me. I am sick of both.” Happily for us, nothing could sicken Boswell of either; and by one of the most moderately wise men that ever lived, the masterpiece of English biography was written.

  The greatest work of the class which exists in the world. The “Tour to the Hebrides” had shown what was to be expected from a man who seems to have been better fitted for his vocation than anybody else who ever lived, and whose name has supplied the English language with a new word. Every year increases the popularity of Boswell’s marvellous work. The world will some day do more justice to his talents, which those who cannot forgive his Toryism are far too prone to run down; for he possessed great dramatic talent, great feeling for humour, and a very keen perception of all the kinds of colloquial excellence. With these men,—and they are not a few,—nine-tenths of whose affected contempt of him rests on the mean foundation that they dislike the very pardonable pride he took in his ancient birth, who would condescend to reason? But if any unprejudiced person doubts the real talent required for doing what Boswell did, let him make the experiment by attempting to describe somebody’s conversation himself. Let him not fancy that he is performing a trivial or undignified task; for which of us, in any station, can hope to render a tithe of the service to the world that was conferred on it by the Laird of Auchinleck?

  Hard names have been freely applied to what has unquestionably proved to be disinterested attachment. Yet who has contributed so much to our amusement? Where shall we find in our own or any other language one who has shown equal talent and industry in recording so much wit, wisdom, and acquaintance with life for the instruction and amusement of mankind? Such a book is not the product of chance. He had no model to follow; but with that happiness of thought, which if it does not imply genius certainly falls little short of it, struck out one for himself. As there has been but one Johnson, so there certainly is but one Boswell. He stands alone in the plan and execution of a work which has won the admiration of every description of reader.

  That altogether unvenerable yet profoundly-verating Scottish gentleman,—that queerest mixture of qualities, of force and weakness, blindness and insight, vanity and solid worth,—has written the finest book of its kind which our nation possesses. It is quite impossible to overstate its worth. You lift it, and immediately the intervening years disappear, and you are in the presence of the Doctor. You are made free of the last century, as you are free of the present. You double your existence. The book is a letter of introduction to a whole knot of departed English worthies. In virtue of Boswell’s labours, we know Johnson—the central man of his time—better than Burke did, or Reynolds,—far better even than Boswell did. We know how he expressed himself, in what grooves his thoughts ran, how he dressed, how he ate, drank, and slept. Boswell’s unconscious art is wonderful, and so is the result attained. This book has arrested, as never book did before, time and decay. Bozzy is really a wizzard: he makes the sun stand still. Till his work is done, the future stands respectfully aloof.

  Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” not only holds an undisputed place among the classical achievements of English Literature, but belongs to that group within the classical group which may be distinguished as consisting of works both well-reputed and read, the other classics being well-reputed and unopened. No one who has this book is content to have it on his shelves, a mere respectability in calf-gilt—one of Charles Lamb’s favourite aversions, “a book which no gentleman’s library should be without.” If it is on his shelves, it is often on his table…. “Boswell’s Johnson” is for me a sort of test-book: according to a man’s judgment of it, I am apt to form my judgment of him. It may not always be a very good test, but it is never a very bad one. In spite, however, of its great reputation, the book is less read now-a-days than its admirers imagine; and I have often been surprised to find how many cultivated men and women, who would assuredly be able to do it full justice, were satisfied with vague second-hand knowledge of it, simply because they had allowed the idle trash of the hour to come between them and it—preferring to read what “every one” is reading to-day, and no one will read to-morrow…. No one has ever reported conversations with a skill comparable to that of Boswell—a skill which appears marvellous when compared with the attempts of others; and although there may have been talkers as good as Johnson, no man’s reported talk has the variety and force of his…. It is Boswell’s eternal merit to have deeply reverenced the man whose littlenesses and asperities he could keenly discern, and has courageously depicted; and his work stands almost alone in Biography because he had this vision and this courage. The image of Johnson is not defaced by these revelations, it only becomes more intelligible in becoming more human.

  Johnson entirely depends on Boswell’s life of him for his fame. The fond Boswell, with all his Scotch affection, and Scotch strength of diligence, gathered the gleanings from the fields, and picked up the heads of grain, long after the reaper had fulfilled his work. The pickings and gatherings, so carefully preserved, have fed many a hungry and empty mind since, and enriched the gallery of English literature.

  His singular gifts as an observer could only escape notice from a careless or inexperienced reader. Boswell has a little of the true Shaksperian secret. He lets his characters show themselves without obtruding unnecessary comment. He never misses the point of a story, though he does not ostentatiously call our attention to it. He gives just what is wanted to indicate character, or to explain the full meaning of a repartee. It is not till we compare his reports with those of less skilful hearers, that we can appreciate the skill with which the essence of a conversation is extracted, and the whole scene indicated by a few telling touches. We are tempted to fancy that we have heard the very thing, and rashly infer that Boswell was simply the mechanical transmitter of the good things uttered. Any one who will try to put down the pith of a brilliant conversation within the same space, may soon satisfy himself of the absurdity of such an hypothesis, and will learn to appreciate Boswell’s powers not only of memory but artistic representation. Such a feat implies not only admirable quickness of appreciation, but a rare literary faculty. Boswell’s accuracy is remarkable; but it is the least part of his merit.

  Johnson, Goldsmith, and all the rest of them are only ghosts until the pertinacious young laird of Auchinleck comes on the scene to give them color, and life, and form.

  The most remarkable biography written in the English language—or indeed, in any language…. Filled with admiration for the works and the character of Dr. Johnson, and desiring to gratify his own vanity and insatiable thirst for notoriety, Boswell attached himself to Johnson as a kind of a humble hanger-on and satellite. He diligently cultivated the acquaintance of the great literary dictator, sought his society on every possible occasion, and took copious notes of everything that he saw or heard…. It was not until 1791 that he gave to the world that wonderful collection of sketches and anecdotes which compose his great masterpiece of biography.

  A paradox in himself, Boswell has been a great cause of paradoxes. The virtue of his incomparable “Life of Johnson,” though apparently parasitic, has been recognized by the best judges as original.

  With me the preparation of these volumes has, indeed, been the work of many years. Boswell’s “Life of Johnson” I read for the first time in my boyhood, when I was too young for it to lay any hold on me. When I entered Pembroke College, Oxford, though I loved to think that Johnson had been there before me, yet I cannot call to mind that I ever opened the pages of Boswell…. Such was my love for the subject that on one occasion, when I was called upon to write a review that should fill two columns of a weekly newspaper, I read a new edition of the “Life” from beginning to end without, I believe, missing a single line of the text or a single note. At length, “towering in the confidence” of one who as yet has but set his foot on the threshold of some stately mansion in which he hopes to find for himself a home, I was rash enough more than twelve years ago to offer myself as editor of a new edition of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.” Fortunately for me another writer had been already engaged by the publisher to whom I applied, and my offer was civilly declined. From that time on I never lost sight of my purpose but when in the troubles of life I well-nigh lost sight of every kind of hope. Everything in my reading that bore on my favourite author was carefully noted, till at length I felt that the materials which I had gathered from all sides were sufficient to shield me from a charge of rashness if I now began to raise the building…. I have now come to the end of my long labours. “There are few things not purely evil,” wrote Johnson, “of which we can say without some emotion of uneasiness, this is the last.” From this emotion I cannot feign that I am free. My book has been my companion in many a sad and many a happy hour. I take leave of it with a pang of regret, but I am cheered by the hope that it may take its place, if a lowly one, among the works of men who have laboured patiently but not unsuccessfully in the great and shining fields of English literature.

  The universal verdict of mankind has placed this work among the five or six most interesting and stimulating of the world’s books.

  Did he (Macaulay) recognise to the full the fact of Boswell’s pre-eminence as an artist? Was he really conscious that the “Life” is an admirable work of art as well as the most readable and companionable of books? As, not content with committing himself thus far, he goes on to prove that Boswell was great because he was little; that he wrote a great book because he was an ass, and that if he had not been an ass his book would probably have been at least a small one, incredulity on these points becomes respectable.

  How much the literary Jupiter owes to his literary satellites, particularly to the first one, it is not easy, at this distance of time, to tell. But who reads his “Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland” in these days? How often is his “Dictionary” consulted? What influence has his “Rambler” upon modern letters? What sweet girl graduate or cultivated Harvard “man” of to-day can quote a line from “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” or knows whether that production is in prose or verse? What would the world have thought of Samuel Johnson at the end of a hundred years if a silly little Scottish laird had not made a hero of him, to be worshipped as no literary man was ever worshipped before or since, and if he had not written a biography of him which is the best in any language, and the model for all others.

  Boswell, then, possessed in perfection some essential qualifications for the biographer—discernment, discrimination, the eye of an artist, a keen sense of literary proportion. His way was made easy for him by good humour, and an unbounded love of society, and his vanity made him impervious to any rebuff, however crushing. His keen sympathy enabled him to penetrate the motives of men, and he had enough of literary skill to convey the impression of a character or of an incident with dramatic reality. In spite of all his weakness, his folly, his dissipation, and the essential shallowness of his character, he had earnestness of purpose enough to force him to untiring perseverance in his task…. Wonderful as it is that a man so compact of folly and vanity, so childish and so weak as Boswell, should have produced a book which has enforced the admiration of the world, yet we need not explain that book as a literary miracle. Its success is achieved by the usual means—insight, sympathy, skill, and perseverance; and its author had served an apprenticeship to his art before he began his greatest work.

  Boswell’s book itself may now, in Parliamentary language, be taken for “read.” As Johnson said of Goldsmith’s “Traveller,” “its merit is established, and individual praise or censure can neither augment nor diminish it.”… What is most distinctive in Boswell is Boswell’s method and Boswell’s manner…. This faculty of communicating his impressions accurately to his reader is Boswell’s most conspicuous gift. Present in his first book, it was more present in his second, and when he began his great biography it had reached its highest point. So individual is his manner, so unique his method of collecting and arranging his information, that to disturb the native character of his narrative by interpolating foreign material, must of necessity impair its specific character and imperil its personal note.

  It is refreshing to turn to Boswell. We shall confine ourselves to Boswell’s character, which has been little studied. If the “Journal to Stella” is a diary of two worlds, Boswell’s “Life” is an atmosphere of one—that of his hero. Yet through this atmosphere his own personality emerges clear and palpable.

  It was through having his attention almost always alert that he was enabled to give us those vivid pictures which make his book a veritable literary cinematograph; for in truth his pages may be said to live; with a few simple but subtle strokes the living scene is dramatically brought before us, and we can almost fancy that we hear the loud voice of Johnson and the sonorous tones of Burke, that we see the quaint figure of Goldsmith and the sedate deportment of Gibbon.

General

  That he was a coxcomb and a bore, weak, vain, pushing, curious, garrulous, was obvious to all who were acquainted with him. That he could not reason, that he had no wit, no humour, no eloquence, is apparent from his writings. And yet his writings are read beyond the Mississippi, and under the Southern Cross, and are likely to be read as long as the English exists, either as a living or as a dead language.

  With all the praise that is lavished upon his biography, the author himself is rather an underrated man. It is pretty generally supposed that little intellectual power was required for such a production—that it is merely an affair of memory and observation. Now such powers of memory and observation are certainly no common endowment…. Macaulay, who dilates upon the meanness of spirit shown in the drawing out of Johnson’s opinions, gives no credit to the ingenuity. Boswell was undoubtedly a man of much social tact, possessing great general knowledge of human nature, and a most penetrating insight into the thoughts and intents of his habitual companions.

  James Boswell has been treated with the greatest injustice and ingratitude by nearly all the literary men who have recorded their opinions concerning him and his work. Sir Walter Scott alone, with characteristic good sense, stands aloof from the rest in his respectful treatment of the distinguished biographer. He does not, indeed, seem to be aware that Boswell requires defence, or that there is any thing particular in a kindly and respectful demeanour towards the author of Johnson’s Life. He knows that Boswell, in spite of his faults, was a high-spirited and honourable gentleman, warm-hearted, and of a most candid and open nature, a sunny temper, and the most unusual and genuine literary abilities. Accordingly, when Sir Walter happens to allude to the Laird of Auchinleck it is always in a friendly and frequently admiring tone—a tone very different from the brutal vituperation of Macaulay or the superior compassion and humane condescension of the great Herr Teufelsdrock. James Boswell did not deserve the hatred of the one or the pity of the other. In standing contrast with the resolute vituperation of the rhetorician and the determined compassion of the prophet, the honest student of English literature will be always glad to encounter the kindly, grateful, and admiring language which flows so gracefully and naturally from the pen of Sir Walter in dealing with the character and the literary performances of Boswell.

  The unique character of Boswell is impressed upon all his works. The many foibles which ruined his career are conspicuous but never offensive; the vanity which makes him proud of his hypochondria and his supposed madness is redeemed by his touching confidence in the sympathy of his fellows; his absolute good-nature, his hearty appreciation of the excellence of his eminent contemporaries, though pushed to absurdity, is equalled by the real vivacity of his observations and the dramatic power of his narrative. Macaulay’s graphic description of his absurdities, and Carlyle’s more penetrating appreciation of his higher qualities, contain all that can be said.