t moving of books. If its literary
value is slight it is a document in character.

So that when he came to his own, when gradually the public whom he
despised and neglected raised him into a pontifical position matched by
none before him in England and none since save Carlyle, he was sure of
himself; success did not spoil him. His judgment was unwarped by
flattery. The almost passionate tenderness and humanity which lay
beneath his gruffness was undimmed. His personality triumphed in all the
fullness and richness which had carried it in integrity through his
years of struggle. For over twenty years from his chair in taverns in
the Strand and Fleet Street he ruled literary London, imposed his
critical principles on the great body of English letters, and by his
talk and his friendships became the embodiment of the literary
temperament of his age.

His talk as it is set down by Boswell is his best monument. It was the
happiest possible fate that threw those two men together, for Boswell
besides being an admirer and reporter sedulously chronicling all his
master said and did, fortunately influenced both the saying and the
doing. Most of us have some one in whose company we best shine, who puts
our wits on their mettle and spurs us to our greatest readiness and
vivacity. There is no doubt that Boswell, for all his assumed humility
and for all Johnson's affected disdain, was just such a companion for
Johnson. Johnson was at his best when Boswell was present, and Boswell
not only drew Johnson out on subjects in which his robust common sense
and readiness of judgment were fitted to shine but actually suggested
and conducted that tour in Scotland which gave Johnson an opportunity
for displaying himself at his best. The recorded talk is
extraordinarily varied and entertaining. It is a mistake to conceive
Johnson as a monster of bear-like rudeness, shouting down opposition,
hectoring his companions, and habitually a blustering verbal bully. We
are too easily hypnotized by Macaulay's flashy caricature. He could be
merciless in argument and often wrongheaded and he was always acute,
uncomfortably acute, in his perception of a fallacy, and a little
disconcerting in his unmasking of pretence. But he could be gay and
tender too and in his heart he was a shrinking and sensitive man.

As a critic (his criticism is the only side of his literary work that
need be considered), Johnson must be allowed a high place. His natural
indolence i