d, and apprehensive of what might come
next.

Then for several years, with a persistency that no rebuffs could abate, and
with a thick skin that no amount of ridicule could render sensitive, he
follows Johnson; forces his way into the Literary Club, where he is not
welcome, in order to be near his idol; carries him off on a visit to the
Hebrides; talks with him on every possible occasion; and, when he is not
invited to a feast, waits outside the house or tavern in order to walk home
with his master in the thick fog of the early morning. And the moment the
oracle is out of sight and in bed, Boswell patters home to record in detail
all that he has seen and heard. It is to his minute record that we owe our
only perfect picture of a great man; all his vanity as well as his
greatness, his prejudices, superstitions, and even the details of his
personal appearance:

There is the gigantic body, the huge face seamed with the scars of disease,
the brown coat, the black worsted stockings, the gray wig with the scorched
foretop, the dirty hands, the nails bitten and pared to the quick. We see
the eyes and mouth moving with convulsive twitches; we see the heavy form
rolling; we hear it puffing; and then comes the "Why, sir!" and the "What
then, sir?" and the "No, sir!" and the "You don't see your way through the
question, sir!"[196]

To Boswell's record we are indebted also for our knowledge of those famous
conversations, those wordy, knockdown battles, which made Johnson famous in
his time and which still move us to wonder. Here is a specimen
conversation, taken almost at random from a hundred such in Boswell's
incomparable biography. After listening to Johnson's prejudice against
Scotland, and his dogmatic utterances on Voltaire, Robertson, and twenty
others, an unfortunate theorist brings up a recent essay on the possible
future life of brutes, quoting some possible authority from the sacred
scriptures:

Johnson, who did not like to hear anything concerning a future state which
was not authorized by the regular canons of orthodoxy, discouraged this
talk; and being offended at its continuation, he watched an opportunity to
give the gentleman a blow of reprehension. So when the poor speculatist,
with a serious, metaphysical, pensive face, addressed him, "But really,
sir, when we see a very sensible dog, we don't know what to think of him";
Johnson, rolling with joy at the thought which beamed in his eye, turned
quickly round an