ible good fortunes is also the dreamer of high and perhaps
unattainable ideals. Shall we count it nothing to his honour that,
instead of sitting down contentedly among the boon companions of
Ayrshire, he aspired to read the best books in the world, to know the
wisest men, and in turn to do something himself that should not be
forgotten? And note that those aspirations were in large part
realized. His intellectual tastes always remained among the keenest of
his pleasures: he numbered among his friends the most famous writer of
his day, the greatest poet, the greatest painter, the profoundest and
most eloquent of all English statesmen; and before he died his apparent
failure in personal achievements was transformed into the success that
means immortality by the production of a book which after the lapse of
a century has many more readers than the works of his great friends
whose superiority to himself he would never have dreamed of challenging.

And what did these great men think of him? Did the people who knew him
think him altogether a fool? If the magistrates {54} of his native
county had thought him merely that they would hardly have chosen him
their chairman. Nor would the Royal Academy who filled their honorary
offices with such men as Johnson, Goldsmith, and Gibbon, have given
them Boswell as a colleague if they had thought him altogether a fool.
Reynolds, again, who was his friend through life, and left him 200
pounds in his will to be expended on a picture to be kept for his sake,
was not a man who took fools for his friends. Burke, who at first
doubted his fitness for election at "The Club," became a great admirer
of his wonderful good humour, and received him on his own account and
without Johnson as a guest at Beaconsfield, where neither fools nor
knaves were commonly welcomed. The whole story of the tour to the
Hebrides shows the regard felt for him, as himself and not only as the
son of his father or the companion of Johnson, by many of the most
distinguished and cultivated men in Scotland. Johnson, the most
veracious of men, says of him in Scotland: "There is no house where he
is not received with kindness and respect"; and on another occasion he
declared that Boswell "never left a house without leaving a wish for
his return."

But the most complete refutation of the worthlessness of Boswell is of
course the {55} friendship and love he won from Johnson himself.
Assuredly, the standard of Johnson,