e
in the town. Or if we wish, not for problems of any kind, but just for
a picture of life as it was lived a hundred and fifty years ago, there
is nothing like Boswell's pages for variety, intimacy, veracity and,
{44} what is the great point in these matters, lavishness of detail.
His book is sown with apparently, but only apparently, insignificant
trifles. What and how Johnson ate, his manner in talking and walking,
the colour and shape of his clothes, the size of his stick, all these
and a thousand similar details we know from Boswell, and because
Boswell had the genius to perceive that they accumulate upon us a
sensation of life and bodily presence, as of a man standing before our
eyes.

So, again, with the many little stories he tells which no one else
would have told. Who but he would have treasured up every word of that
curious meeting in April 1778, between Johnson and his unimportant old
friend Edwards, the man who said that he had tried to be a philosopher,
but "cheerfulness was always breaking in"? Yet it is not only one of
the most Boswellian but one of the very best things in the whole book.
It exactly illustrates what was newest in his method. In an age of
generality and abstraction he saw the advantage of the concrete and
particular, and put into practice the lesson his master could only
preach, "Nothing is too little for so little a creature as man." So
the total-abstaining Johnson and the bibulous Reynolds and Boswell will
each come before us exactly as they were: and we are amused as we
picture {45} the confusion of Reynolds's distinguished parties where
the servants had never been taught to wait, and make a note of the
progress of social manners as we sympathize with Johnson at Edinburgh
throwing the fingered lump of sugar out of the window. Some people,
again, like Mr. Gladstone, are fond of observing and discoursing upon
the changes of taste in the matter of wine: and such people will find
in Boswell almost as much to interest their curiosity as Johnson's own
fellowship of tea-drinkers. The drinker of champagne will have to
accept the mere modernity of his beverage, which finds no place in
Johnson's famous hierarchy: "Claret for boys, port for men, brandy for
heroes." Or, once more, if our meal ends in tobacco, we may please
ourselves by contemplating the alternate, but never contemporaneous,
glories of snuff and tobacco, and note the sage's curious, but strictly
truthful, account of the ad