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Last, but not least, comes James Boswell, whom somebody, in a fit of petulance, ance called "a Scotch cur." "No, no," replied Goldsmith, who stood by, "he is not a Scotch cur; he is merely a Scotch bur. Tom Davies threw him at Johnsen in sport, and he has the faculty of sticking." Washington Irving called Boswell the incarnation of toadyism, and it is certain that he flattered Johnson to the top of his bent; but he was neither a coxcomb nor a clown, and there was more to admire in the man than the constancy of his friendship, or his facility in taking notes; and, as Carlyle says, the "fact of his reverence for Johnson will ever remain noteworthy." Macaulay, with his fondness for dramatic contrasts, seeks to heighten the character of Johnson by pouring contempt on his biographer; but even he is compelled to admit that Boswell, who was a very small man, has beaten, in the region of biography, the greatest men who ever tried their hands at that difficult

art.

Boswell was twenty-three, and Johnson fifty-five, when they first met in May 1736, in Davies the bookseller's shop. The young Scotch lawyer had a great hankering after personal introductions to eminent men, and not unnaturally he was extremely wishful to make the acquaintance of Johnson. He was drinking tea with the bookseller and his comely wife, when Johnson's shadow fell across the glass door which divided the shop from the parlour in which the little group was seated. Davies, who had but recently retired from the boards, true to his histrionic instincts, "announced his awful approach somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost-'Look, my lad; he comes." Boswell, who knew Johnson's violent prejudice against the Scotch, forgetful of the fact that his own speech would

immediately betray him, implored Davies, in a hurried aside, not to mention where he came from. But Davies loved his joke too well to comply, and judged, moreover, like a sensible man, that it was best to take the bull by the horns, SO "Mr. Boswell from Scotland" was duly presented. Afraid that such an announcement would close the door to further parley, Boswell gasped out in apologetic tones— "Mr. Johnson, I do indeed come from Scotland-but I cannot help it!" Instantly came the characteristic response, "That, sir, I find is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help." From that day forward, for twenty years, Boswell followed Johnson about from place_to place, watching his daily conduct, treasuring his chance remarks, eliciting his opinions, receiving his rebukes, and crowding the pages of his note-books with exact and picturesque details and racy sayings, which render the biography which he afterwards wrote a most realistic description of the man and his surroundings, as well as a perfect store-house of "wise saws and modern instances."

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Of Boswell, indeed, when his theme is Johnson, it is not too much to say that age cannot wither, nor custom stale, his infinite variety." From childhood to old age, at work or play, in hours of boisterous mirth and in seasons of deep melancholy, at church, at home, in Fleet Street, or at the "Club;" when Burke's arguments called forth all his powers, Goldsmith's debts all his pity, or blind Mrs. Williams's fretfulness all his patience, James Boswell never fails to bring us face to face with the great "Sultan of English Literature," whom he dogged so persistently down the last twenty years of an ever-widening career. If Boswell sometimes irritated Dr. Johnson by his pointless remarks and shallow inquisitiveness,

it must at least be owned that he eventually made handsome amends for his tiresome behaviour. Throughout his life, Boswell remained conspicuous for a certain mature puerility; and this, to a man like Johnson, whose character every year which passed more deeply mellowed, must have proved exasperating in the extreme; but, on the other hand, though at heart kindly, tender, and generous even to a fault, the sturdy but somewhat slovenly moralist was himself far from perfect, for he had a temper which flashed fire like a flint; and in conversation he was positive, overbearing, and impatient of contradiction.

Out of a friendship so unequal sprang in due time a biography as honest, sympathetic, and minute as ever was penned; a picture, in short, distinguished beyond all others by that perfect art which conceals itself. Boswell has made us all his debtors, for in his graphic pages Dr. Johnson lives and laughs, and walks and talks before us. Let it be granted once for all that the honest fellow, with his ridiculous family pride, childish vanity, and too palpable hero-worship, said and did many foolish things; yet it would be wholly ungracious to pick a quarrel on that account with the patient listener who rescued Johnson's wise and witty table-talk from oblivion. Boswell has, in truth, immortalised himself by this performance; and it goes almost without the saying-so long as Don Quixote is remembered, Sancho Panza, most faithful of squires, will never be forgotten.

When the Tory party obtained a renewal of power soon after the accession of George III., Johnson, who was a zealous champion of Church and State, was not neglected. The king, who was more favourably disposed to men of literary merit than either George I. or George II., bestowed upon him-entirely unsought-a pension of three hundred

pounds a-year. Johnson hesitated; he was, in fact, afraid that his acceptance might be regarded as a political bribe, and he was determined to be the tool of no government, and more especially of one which he held, in Boswell's words, to be "founded in usurpation." Lord Bute, however, removed his scruples by assuring him that it was conferred upon him, not for what he might yet do, but for what he had actually done. Satisfied that his independence was not imperilled, and that no political services were expected from him, he gratefully accepted this opportune release from the burden of financial care, and for the next fifteen years, so far as his pen was concerned, he may almost be said to have obeyed to the letter the well-known piece of advice-" rest and be thankful." Time had toned down the fierce Jacobitism of his youth, and he said jocosely in his later years, "I cannot now curse the House of Hanover, but I think that the pleasure of cursing the House of Hanover, and drinking King James's health, are amply over-balanced by three hundred pounds a-year." It was soon after this happy escape from care that Boswell was introduced to him, under circumstances already described, and from that time forward, in the language of Macaulay's famous essay-"Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame, and in the enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other man in history. Everything about him-his coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight

disputations, his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge, and the negro Frankall are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood."

Set free from care, Johnson grew genial, and although his temper was always quick, and he was accustomed to call a spade a spade, and had no patience with sentimental grievances or "foppish lamentations," few men who ever lived were more ready to succour the distressed or uplift the fallen. "He loved the poor," relates Mrs. Piozzi, "as I never yet saw anyone else do, with an earnest desire to make them happy." In the sharpest years of his own poverty, he would thrust pence into the hands of sleeping children whom he passed in his dreary midnight rambles about town, in order that when dawn awakened them from their uneasy slumbers on the cold steps of warehouse or mansion, they at least might be able to buy themselves a morsel of bread. He endured with pitying forbearance the querulous complaints of the maimed and helpless folk who, with no other claim upon him than their dire need, had found an asylum in a house, which they darkened with their discontent. He could tenderly uplift the poor, famished outcast of the streets, and bear her gently on his own shoulders to the shelter of his home. Chesterfield's politeness-it is not too much to say-shrivels into contempt in the presence of Johnson's compassion. He might not be able to bow as gracefully to the rich, but his generous heart had taught him to stoop to the poor. Lord Auchinleck, with a sneer, called Johnson "Ursa Major; "

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