st he is like an advertisement hoarding, crude, violent, vulgar,
but impossible to escape. The essay on Croker's Boswell is one of
those unfortunate moments. It is, unhappily, far better known than its
author's article on Johnson written for the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_,
and its violence still takes the memory by assault. No one forgets the
disgusting description of Johnson, or the insults heaped upon Boswell.
Least of all can anybody forget the famous paradox about the contrast
between Boswell and his book. As a biographer, according to Macaulay,
Boswell has easily surpassed all rivals. "Homer is not more decidedly
the first of Epic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of
dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators than
Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. Eclipse is
first, and the rest nowhere." And yet this same Boswell is "a man of
the meanest and feeblest intellect"; and, strangest of all, only
achieves his amazing success by force of his worthlessness and folly.
"If he had not {39} been a great fool he would never have been a great
writer."

Macaulay was the most self-confident of men. But, though he set his
opinion with assurance against that of any other critic, there was one
verdict he respected, the verdict of time. He would not have been
astonished to hear that in the eighty years since his essay was written
the fame of Boswell's book has continually increased. But few things
that have happened since then would have surprised him more than to be
told that, in a volume published only fifty years after his death and
in part officially addressed to his own University of Cambridge, a
Professor of English Literature, one of the two or three universally
acknowledged masters of criticism, would be found quietly letting fall,
as a thing about which there need be no discussion, a sentence
beginning with the words: "A wiser man than Macaulay, James Boswell."

It may be well, before speaking further of Johnson, to say something
about the man to whom we owe most of our knowledge of him, the most
important member of his circle, this same James Boswell. Like all good
biographers, he has put himself into his book; and we know him as well
as we know Johnson, as we know no other two men, perhaps, in the
history of the world. It cannot be denied {40} that, when we put his
great book down, it is not very easy to follow Sir Walter Raleigh in
talking of him as