of which is that every man imagines
he has read it, though he may never have opened its pages. It is like
the historic landmark of one's home town, which foreigners from overseas
come to study, but which the denizen has hardly entered. It is like
Niagara Falls: we have a very fair mental picture of the spectacle and
little zeal to visit the uproar itself. And so, though we all use
Doctor Johnson's sharply stamped coinages, we generally are too lax
about visiting the mint.

But we will never cease to pray that every honest man should study
Boswell. There are many who have topped the rise of human felicity in
that book: when reading it they feel the tide of intellect brim the mind
with a unique fullness of satisfaction. It is not a mere commentary on
life: it _is_ life--it fills and floods every channel of the brain. It
is a book that men make a hobby of, as golf or billiards. To know it is
a liberal education. I could have understood Germany yearning to invade
England in order to annex Boswell's Johnson. There would have been some
sense in that.

What is the average man's conception of Doctor Johnson? We think of a
huge ungainly creature, slovenly of dress, addicted to tea, the author
of a dictionary and the center of a tavern coterie. We think of him
prefacing bluff and vehement remarks with "Sir," and having a knack for
demolishing opponents in boisterous argument. All of which is passing
true, just as is our picture of the Niagara we have never seen; but how
it misses the inner tenderness and tormented virtue of the man!

So it is refreshing sometimes to turn away from Boswell to those
passages where the good old Doctor has revealed himself with his own
hand. The letter to Chesterfield is too well known for comment. But no
less noble, and not nearly so well known, is the preface to the
Dictionary. How moving it is in its sturdy courage, its strong grasp of
the tools of expression. In every line one feels the weight and push of
a mind that had behind it the full reservoir of language, particularly
the Latin. There is the same sense of urgent pressure that one feels in
watching a strong stream backed up behind a dam:

I look with pleasure on my book, however defective, and deliver it
to the world with the spirit of a man that has endeavored well. That
it will immediately become popular I have not promised to myself: a
few wild blunders, and risible absurdities, from which no work of
such multipl