Hierocles. But
these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses.
Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a
great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the
qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he
lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery,
the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have
produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a
Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues,
an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the most liberal
hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a man without
delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was
hurting the feelings of others or when he was exposing himself to
derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important
department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as
Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.

Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers,
Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single
remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which
is not either common-place or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary
gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates,
may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would
be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to
argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations
made by himself in the course of conversation.

Of those observations we do not remember one which is above the
intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed many of his
own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling.
Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally
considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He
had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These
qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of
themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but because he was a
dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal.

Those parts of his book which, considered abstractedly, are most utterly
worthless, are delightful when we read them as illustrations of the
character of the writer. Bad in themselves, they are good dramatically,
like the