, is melancholy
reading; the _Journey to the Western Hebrides_ has been utterly eclipsed
by Boswell's livelier and more human chronicle of the same events. The
_Lives of the Poets_, his greatest work, was composed with pain and
difficulty when he was seventy years old; even it is but a quarry from
which a reader may dig the ore of a sound critical judgment summing up
a life's reflection, out of the grit and dust of perfunctory
biographical compilations. There was hardly one of the literary coterie
over which he presided that was not doing better and more lasting work.
Nothing that Johnson wrote is to be compared, for excellence in its own
manner, with _Tom Jones_ or the _Vicar of Wakefield_ or the _Citizen of
the World_. He produced nothing in writing approaching the magnitude of
Gibbon's _Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, or the profundity of
Burke's philosophy of politics. Even Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose main
business was painting and not the pen, was almost as good an author as
he; his _Discourses_ have little to fear when they are set beside
Johnson's essays. Yet all these men recognised him as their guide and
leader; the spontaneous selection of such a democratic assembly as men
of genius in a tavern fixed upon him as chairman, and we in these later
days, who are safe from the overpowering force of personality
and presence--or at least can only know of it reflected in
books--instinctively recognize him as the greatest man of his age. What
is the reason?

Johnson's pre-eminence is the pre-eminence of character. He was a great
moralist; he summed up in himself the tendencies of thought and
literature of his time and excelled all others in his grasp of them; and
he was perhaps more completely than any one else in the whole history of
English literature, the typical Englishman. He was one of those to whom
is applicable the commonplace that he was greater than his books. It is
the fashion nowadays among some critics to speak of his biographer
Boswell as if he were a novelist or a playwright and to classify the
Johnson we know with Hamlet and Don Quixote as the product of creative
or imaginative art, working on a "lost original." No exercise of
critical ingenuity could be more futile or impertinent. The impression
of the solidity and magnitude of Johnson's character which is to be
gathered from Boswell is enforced from other sources; from his essays
and his prayers and meditations, from the half-dozen or so lives an