in whose presence nobody dared to
swear or talk loosely, was not a low one either morally or
intellectually; yet we find him saying that he held Boswell "in his
heart of hearts"; perhaps, indeed, he loved Boswell better than any of
his friends. "My dear Boswell, I love you very much"; "My dear
Boswell, your kindness is one of the pleasures of my life"; "Come to
me, my dear Bozzy, and let us be as happy as we can." This is the way
Johnson constantly wrote and spoke to him. And this was not merely
because Boswell was "the best travelling companion in the world," or
even because he was, what Johnson also called him, "a man who finds
himself welcome wherever he goes and makes new friends faster than he
can want them," but also for graver reasons. Johnson said once that
most friendships were the result of caprice or chance, "mere
confederacies in vice or leagues in folly," but he did not choose that
his own should be of that sort. Beauclerk is the only one of his
friends who was not a man of high character. His feeling for Boswell
was not a love of vice or folly. He saw Boswell at his best, no doubt:
but that best must have had very real and positive good qualities in it
to win from Johnson such a remark as he {56} makes in one of his
letters: "Never, my dear sir, do you take it into your head to think
that I do not love you; you may settle yourself in full confidence both
of my love and my esteem; I love you as a kind man, I value you as a
worthy man, and hope in time to reverence you as a man of exemplary
piety. I hold you, as Hamlet has it, 'in my heart of hearts.'" And
there is a still more remarkable tribute in the letter to John Wesley
giving Boswell an introduction to him "because I think it very much to
be wished that worthy and religious men should be acquainted with each
other." Nothing can be more certain than that Johnson would not have
written so often in such language as this of a man who was what
Macaulay thought Boswell was. Well may the foolish editor of Boswell's
letters to Temple, who takes Macaulay's view, talk of the difficulty of
explaining how it came about that Boswell formed one of a society which
included such men as Johnson and Burke. The truth is that on his
theory and Macaulay's it is not explicable at all.

Less explicable still, on that view, is the admitted excellence of
Boswell's book. Carlyle dismissed with just contempt the absurd
paradox that the greatness of the book was due