well too. It ought to be {42} much more than
interest, and in all true Johnsonians it is. Without Boswell, we
should have respected Johnson, honoured him as a man and a writer,
liked him as "a true-born Englishman," but we could not have known him
enough to love him. By the help of Boswell, we can walk and talk with
him, dine with him, be with him at his prayers as well as at his
pleasures, laugh with him, learn of him and disagree with him; above
all, love him as we only can love a human being, and never a mere wise
man or great writer. No Englishman doubts that Boswell has given us
one of the great books of the world. But before we realize its
greatness, we realize its pleasantness, its companionableness. The
_Life of Johnson_ and the _Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides_ may be
taken for practical purposes as one book; and it has some claim to be
the most companionable book in the world. There is no book like it for
a solitary meal. A novel, if it is good for anything, is too
engrossing for a dinner companion. It is impossible to put it down.
It interrupts the business of dining and results in cold food and
indigestion. A book of short poems--the Odes of Horace, the Fables of
La Fontaine, the Sonnets of Shakespeare or Wordsworth--is much more to
the purpose. One may read an Ode or a Sonnet quickly and then turn
{43} again to one's dinner, carrying the fine verse in one's mind and
tasting it at leisure as one holds good wine in the mouth before
letting it pass away into forgetfulness. But poetry is not for every
man, nor for every mood of any man: and the moment of dinner is not
with most men the moment when they appear most poetic either to others
or to themselves.

But is there any time which is not the time for Boswell? He does not
ask for a mood which may not be forthcoming: he does not demand an
attention which it is inconvenient to give. We can take him up and lay
him down as and when we will. And he has everything in his store. If
we are seriously inclined and wish to have something to think about
when we turn from the book to the dinner, he is full of the most
serious questions, discussed sometimes wisely, almost always by wise
men, the problems of morals and politics, of religion and society and
literature, such questions as those of liberty and necessity in
philosophy, liberty and government in politics, the English Church and
the Roman, private education and public, life in the country and lif