more we know of him, the more
certain are we to agree with this closing sentence from Macaulay's
_Life of Johnson_: "And it is but just to say that our intimate
acquaintance with what he would himself have called the
anfractuosities of his intellect and of his temper serves only to
strengthen our conviction that he was both a great and a good man."

A Great Converser and Literary Lawgiver.--By nature Johnson was
fitted to be a talker. He was happiest when he had intelligent
listeners. Accordingly, he and Sir Joshua Reynolds, the artist,
founded the famous Literary Club in 1764. During Johnson's lifetime
this had for members such men as Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith,
Charles James Fox, James Boswell, Edward Gibbon, and David Garrick.
Macaulay says: "The verdicts pronounced by this conclave on new books
were speedily known over all London, and were sufficient to sell off a
whole edition in a day, or to condemn the sheets to the service of the
trunk maker and the pastry cook... To predominate over such a society
was not easy; yet even over such a society Johnson predominated."

He was consulted as an oracle on all kinds of subjects, and his
replies were generally the pith of common sense. So famous had Johnson
become for his conversations that George III. met him on purpose to
hear him talk. A committee from forty of the leading London
booksellers waited on Johnson to ask him to write the _Lives of the
English Poets_. There was then in England no other man with so much
influence in the world of literature.

Boswell's Life of Johnson.--In 1763 James Boswell (1740-1795), a
Scotchman, met Johnson and devoted much time to copying the words that
fell from the great Doctor's lips and to noting his individual traits.
We must go to Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, the greatest of all
biographies, to read of Johnson as he lived and talked; in short, to
learn those facts which render him far more famous than his written
works.

[Illustration: JAMES BOSWELL.]

Leslie Stephen saw: "I would still hope that to many readers Boswell
has been what he has certainly been to some, the first writer who gave
them a love of English literature, and the most charming of all
companions long after the bloom of novelty has departed. I subscribe
most cheerfully to Mr. Lewes's statement that he estimates his
acquaintances according to their estimate of Boswell."

A Champion of the Classical School.--Johnson was a powerful adherent
of classicism, a