alled up from their
graves to do penance for their arrogant unfairness. Carlyle did
something, but not enough; and he stands almost alone. Yet after all,
considering what we owe Boswell, if there be any blindness in our view
of him, it surely ought to be blindness to his faults. We have heard
enough and to spare of his vanity, his self-importance, his entire lack
of dignity, his weakness for wine and worse things than wine. But we
have heard very little, far too little, of the kindness and genuineness
of the man's whole nature, the warmth of his friendships and the
enthusiastic loyalty of his hero-worship, of the reverence for religion
and the earnest desire after being a better man, which, though often
defeated {50} by temptation, were profound and absolutely sincere.

The notion that a man who does not practise what he preaches is
necessarily insincere, always called forth an angry protest from
Johnson. "Sir," he broke out at Inverary to Mr. M'Aulay, the
historian's grandfather, "are you so grossly ignorant of human nature,
as not to know that a man may be very sincere in good principles
without having good practice?" No doubt this was a doctrine which
Boswell heard gladly: and Johnson may himself have been influenced in
his zeal for it by his consciousness that, as he said when enforcing it
on another occasion, he had himself preached better than he had
practised. "I have, all my life long, been lying till noon: yet I tell
all young men, and tell them with great sincerity, that nobody who does
not rise early will ever do any good." But, however that may be, he is
plainly right in the broad issue. Practice is the only absolute proof
of sincerity: but defect in practice is no proof of insincerity.
Certainly, no Christian can doubt that the struggling, even though
falling, sinner is in at least as hopeful a condition as the complacent
person whose principles and practice are fairly conformable to each
other because both live only the dormant life of respectability and
{51} convention. However, no one in his senses will try to make a hero
or a saint out of Boswell. He was, as has been already said, vain, a
babbler, a wine-bibber, a man of frequently irregular and ill-governed
life. But to judge a man fairly as a whole, you must set his
achievements against his failures, and include his aspirations as well
as the weakness which prevented their being realized. He may also
reasonably ask to be tried by the stan