bject
which had been distorted or confused by the perverse ingenuity of
Johnson "talking for victory" comes quietly, after the smoke has
cleared away, from the despised imbecility of Boswell? Who gives the
judgment which every one would now give about the contest with the
American colonies? Not Johnson but Boswell; not the author of
_Taxation No Tyranny_, but the man who wrote so early as 1775 to his
friend Temple: "I am growing more and more an American. I see the
unreasonableness of taxing them without the consent of their
Assemblies; I think our Ministry are mad in undertaking this desperate
war." Who was right and who was wrong on the question of the Middlesex
Election? Nobody now doubts that Boswell was right, and Johnson was
wrong. Which has proved wiser, as we look back, Johnson who ridiculed
Gray's poetry, or Boswell who sat up all night reading it? The fact is
that Boswell was undoubtedly a {67} sensible and cultivated as well as
a very agreeable man, and as such was warmly welcomed at the houses of
the most intelligent men of his day.

The old estimate, then, of James Boswell must be definitely abandoned.
The man who knew him best, his friend Temple, the friend of Gray, said
of him that he was "the most thinking man he had ever known." We may
not feel able to regard that as anything more than the judgment of
friendship: but it is not fools who win such judgments even from their
friends. We may wonder at the word "genius" being applied to him; and
if genius be taken in the stricter modern sense of transcendent powers
of mind, the sense in which it is applied to Milton or Michael Angelo,
there is of course no doubt that it would be absurd to apply it to
Boswell. But if the word be used in the old looser sense, or if it be
given the definite meaning of a man who originates an important new
departure in a serious sphere of human action, who creates something of
a new order in art or literature or politics or war, then Boswell's
claim to genius cannot be questioned. Just as another member of
"Johnson's Club" was in those years writing history as it had never
been written before, so, and to a far more remarkable degree, Boswell
was writing {68} biography as it had never been written before.
Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_ was in fact a far less original
performance, far less of a new departure, than Boswell's _Life of
Johnson_. Boswell's book is in truth what he himself called it, "more
of a life than any w