, no man has a greater respect or
affection for you, or would sooner go to the end of the world to serve you.
Now, to treat me so--' He insisted that I had interrupted him, which I
assured him was not the case; and proceeded, 'But why treat me so before
people who neither love you nor me?' Johnson: 'Well I am sorry for it. I'll
make it up to you in twenty different ways, as you please.' Boswell: 'I
said to-day to Sir Joshua, when he observed that you _tossed_ me sometimes,
I don't care how often or how high he tosses me when only friends are
present, for then I fall upon soft ground; but I do not like falling upon
stones, which is the case when enemies are present. I think this is a
pretty good image, sir.' Johnson: 'Sir, it is one of the happiest I ever
have heard.'"

Is there anything more delicious outside Falstaff and Bardolph, or Don
Quixote and Sancho Panza? Indeed, Bardolph's immortal "Would I were with
him wheresoe'er he be, whether in heaven or in hell," is in the very spirit
of Boswell's devotion to his hero.

It was his failings as much as his talents that enabled him to work the
miracle. His lack of self-respect and humour, his childish egotism, his
love of gossip, his naive bathos, and his vulgarities contributed as much
to the making of his immortal book as his industry, his wonderful verbal
memory, and his doglike fidelity. I have said that his greatness is only
reflected. But that is hardly just. It might even be more true to say that
Johnson owes his immortality to Boswell. What of him would remain to-day
but for the man who took his scourgings so humbly and repaid them by
licking the boot that kicked him? Who now reads _London_, or _The Vanity of
Human Wishes_, or _The Rambler_? I once read _Rasselas_, and found it
pompous and dull. And I have read _The Lives of the Poets_, and though they
are not pompous and dull, they are often singularly poor criticism, and the
essay on Milton is, in some respects, as mean a piece of work as ever came
out of Grub Street.

But _The Life_! What in all the world of books is there like it? I have
been reading it off and on for more than thirty years, and still find it
inexhaustible. It ripens with the years. It is so intimate that it seems to
be a record of my own experiences. I have dined so often with Johnson at
the Mitre and Sir Joshua's and Langton's and the rest that I know him far
better than the shadows I meet in daily life. I seem to have been present
when he