dard of his contemporaries. If
this larger and juster method of judgment be adopted, the unfairness
with which Boswell has been treated becomes immediately obvious. After
all vanity is more a folly than a crime, and pays its own immediate
penalty as no other crime or folly does. The other faults of Boswell,
especially drinking, were only too common in a century at the beginning
of which Johnson remembered "all the decent people at Lichfield getting
drunk every night," and at the end of which the most honoured and
feared of English Prime Ministers could appear intoxicated in the House
of Commons itself. Drunkenness has not deprived Pitt of the gratitude
of England, and we may well be determined that, if we can help it, it
shall not deprive Boswell. It is not his vices but his virtues that
are notable and unusual. What was extraordinary in his or any other
day was {52} the generous enthusiasm which made a young Scotch laird
deliberately determine that he would do something more with his life
than shoot wildfowl or play cards, made him throw himself first with a
curious mixture of vanity and genuine devotion to a noble cause into
the Corsican struggle for liberty, and then, vain of his birth and
fortune as he was, place himself at the feet, not of a duke or a
minister, but of a man of low origin, rough exterior, and rougher
manners, in whom he simply saw the best and wisest man he had known.
That is not the action of either a bad man or a fool; and assuredly
Boswell--in the essence of him--was neither the one nor the other.

The truth is that he had the strength and the weaknesses of a man of
mobile and lively imagination. He would fancy his wife and children
drowned or dead for no better reason than that he was not by them; he
would dream of being a judge when he had scarcely got a brief, and
imagine himself a minister when he had no prospect of getting into
Parliament. Other people experience these day-dreaming vanities, but
they do not talk or write about them. Boswell did; and we all laugh at
him, especially the fools among us: the wiser part add some of the love
that belongs to the common kinship of humanity wherever it puts off the
mask, the love of which we feel {53} something even for that gross old
"bourgeois" Samuel Pepys, just because he laid out his whole secret
self in black and white upon the paper. Moreover, Boswell's
absurdities had their finer side. The dreamer of improbable disasters
and imposs