a wise man, or even as a wiser man than Macaulay. If
Boswell and Macaulay were put into competition in a prize for wisdom,
no ordinary examiners would give it to Boswell. By the only tests they
could apply, Macaulay must far outstrip him. The wisdom which enabled
Macaulay to render splendid services to the State and to literature,
and gave him wealth, happiness, popularity and a peerage, is as easily
tested, and, it must be confessed, as real, as the unwisdom which ended
in Boswell dying the dishonoured death of a drunkard, and leaving a
name of which his descendants felt the shame at least as much as the
glory.

But there are other tests, and though their superior value may be
doubted, they ought not to be altogether ignored. Macaulay, who knew
everything and achieved so much, spent his whole life in visible and
external activities--talking, reading, writing, governing; and was
admired, and, indeed, admirable in them all. But of the wisdom which
realizes how essentially inferior all measurable doing, however
triumphant, is to being, which is immeasurable, the wisdom which is
occupied with the ultimate issues of life and death, he had apparently
as little as any man who ever lived. He seems {41} always to have been
one of those active, hurrying, useful persons who--

"Fancy that they put forth all their life
And never know how with the soul it fares."

Whatever can be said against Boswell that cannot be said. Of this
inner wisdom, this quietness of thought, this "folie des grandeurs" of
the soul, he had a thousand times as much as Macaulay. He could not
cling to it to the end, he could not victoriously live by it and make
it himself; but he had seen the vision which Macaulay never saw, and he
never altogether forgot it. Every man is partly a lost soul. So far
as Boswell was that, he knew it in all the bitter certainty of tears.
So far as Macaulay was, he was as unconscious of it as the beasts that
perish. And the kingdom of wisdom, like the Kingdom of Heaven, is more
easily entered by those who know that they are outside it, than by
those who do not know that there is such a place and are quite content
where they are.

But these are high matters into which there is no need to go further.
It is necessary, however, to say a little more about Boswell's
character and abilities. He and Johnson are now linked together for
all eternity; and everybody who takes an interest in Johnson is
interested in Bos