and perverse, now rude almost to brutality, now so weak that the same
resolution is repeated year after year only to be again broken and
again renewed, now so gross and almost repulsive in his appearance and
habits that it requires all his greatness to explain the welcome which
well-bred men and refined women everywhere gave him. Nothing better
shows the greatness of Boswell. He was not afraid to paint the wart on
his Cromwell's nose, because he knew that he could so give the
nobleness of the whole face, that the wart would merely add to the
truthfulness of the portrait without detracting from its nobleness.
The vast quantity of material which he brought into his book and the
complete mastery which he maintained over it, is shown by the fact {65}
that few or no biographies record so many ridiculous or discreditable
circumstances about their hero, and yet none leaves a more convincing
impression of his greatness.

The notion, then, that the man who wrote the _Life of Johnson_ was a
fool, is an absurdity. If the arguments in its favour prove anybody a
fool it is not Boswell. Nor is it even true that Boswell, like some
great artists, escaped apparently by some divine gift from his natural
folly just during the time necessary for the production of his great
work, but at all other times relapsed at once into imbecility. We know
how scrupulously accurate he was in what he wrote, not only from his
candour in relating his own defeats, but from the many cases in which
he confesses that he was not quite sure of the exact facts, such as, to
give one instance, whether Johnson, on a certain occasion, spoke of "a
page" or "ten lines" of Pope as not containing so much sense as one
line of Cowley. Therefore we may take the picture he gives of himself
in his book as a fair one. And what is it? Does it bear out the
notorious assertion that "there is not in all his books a single remark
of his own on literature, politics, religion or society which is not
either commonplace or absurd"? One would sometimes imagine Macaulay
had never read the book of which he speaks with such {66} confident
decision. Certainly, except as a biographer, Boswell was not a man of
any very remarkable abilities. But, in answer to such an insult as
Macaulay's, Boswell's defenders may safely appeal to the book itself,
and to everybody who has read it with any care. Will any one deny that
not once or twice, but again and again, the plain sense of some su