man
whose face we never saw, whose voice we never heard. Boswell boasted
that he had "Johnsonized the land," and that he had shown Johnson in
his book as no man had ever been shown in a book before; and the boast
is after a hundred years seen to be a literal statement of fact. But
after all Boswell did not make Johnson's reputation. On the contrary,
it was Johnson's name that sold Boswell's book. No man owes so much to
his biographer as Johnson to Boswell, but that must not make us forget
that Johnson was the most famous man of letters in England before he
ever saw Boswell. Boswell's earnest desire to make his acquaintance
and to sit humbly at his feet was only an extreme {14} instance of an
attitude of respect and admiration, often even of reverence, commonly
felt towards him among the more intelligent and serious portion of the
community. He had not then attained to the position of something like
Dictatorship which he filled in the world of English letters at the
time he wrote the _Lives of the Poets_, but, except the _Shakespeare_
and the _Lives_, all the work that gave him that position was already
done. In this case, as in others, fame increased in old age without
any corresponding increase in achievement, and it was the easy years at
Streatham, not the laborious years at Gough Square, that saw him
honoured and courted by bishops and judges, peers and commoners, by the
greatest of English statesmen and the greatest of English painters.
But his kingship was in him from the first. He had been _anax andron_
even among his schoolfellows. His bigness, in more ways than one, made
them call him "the great boy," and the father of one of them was astute
enough even then to perceive that he would be more than that: "you call
him the great boy, but take my word for it, he will one day prove a
great man." The boys looked upon him so much as a superior being to
themselves that three of them, of whom one was his friend Hector, whom
he often saw in later life, "used to come in the morning as his humble
{15} attendants and carry him to school. One in the middle stooped
while he sat upon his back, and one on each side supported him, and
thus he was borne triumphant." Such a tribute by boys to intellectual
superiority was less rare in those days than it has become since: but
it would not be easy to find a parallel to it at any time. What began
at school continued through life. Even when he was poorest and most
obscure,