g broadly and fundamentally human about him
which appeals to all and especially to the plain man. Every one feels
at home at once with a man who replies to doubts about the freedom of
the will with the plain man's answer: "Sir, we _know_ our will's free,
and there's an end on't," and if he adds to it an argument which the
plain man would not have thought of, it is still one which the plain
man and everyone else can understand. "You are surer that you can lift
up your finger or not as you please, than you are of any {12}
conclusion from a deduction of reasoning." Moreover we all think we
are more honest than our neighbours and are at once drawn to the man
who was less of a humbug than any man who ever lived. "Clear your mind
of cant" is perhaps the central text of Johnson, on which he enlarged a
hundred times. "When a butcher tells you his heart bleeds for his
country, he has in fact no uneasy feeling." No one who has ever
attended an election meeting fails to welcome that saying, or the
answer to Boswell's fears that if he were in Parliament he would be
unhappy if things went wrong, "That's cant, sir. . . . Public affairs
vex no man." "Have they not vexed yourself a little, sir? Have you
not been vexed at all by the turbulence of this reign and by that
absurd vote of the House of Commons, 'That the influence of the Crown
has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished'?" "Sir, I
have never slept an hour less, nor eat an ounce less meat. I would
have knocked the factious dogs on the head, to be sure; but I was not
_vexed_."

Here we all know where we are. This is what we wish we could have said
ourselves, and can fancy ourselves saying under more favourable
circumstances; and we like the man who says it for us. Certainly no
man, not even Swift, ever put the plain man's view with {13} such
exactness, felicity, and force as Johnson does a thousand times in the
pages of Boswell. And not only in the pages of Boswell. One of the
objects of this introductory chapter is to try to give a preliminary
answer to the very natural question which confronts every one who
thinks about Johnson, how it has come about that a man whose works are
so little read to-day should still be so great a name in English life.
How is it that in this HOME UNIVERSITY LIBRARY he is the second author
to have a volume to himself, only Shakespeare preceding him? The
primary answer is, of course, that we know him, as we know no other