ork that has ever yet appeared." After it the art
of biography could never be merely what it had been before. And in
that sense, the sense of a man whose work is an advance upon that of
his predecessors, not merely in degree, but in kind, Boswell was
undoubtedly and even more than Gibbon, entitled to the praise of genius.

Let us all, then, unashamedly and ungrudgingly give the rein to our
admiration and love of Boswell. There is a hundred years between us
and his follies, and every one of the hundred is full of his claim upon
our gratitude. Let us now be ready to pay the debt in full. Let us be
sure that there is something more than mere interest or entertainment
in a book which so wise a man as Jowett confessed to having read fifty
times, of which another lifelong thinker about life, a man very
different from Jowett, Robert Louis Stevenson, could write: "I am
taking a little Boswell daily by way of a Bible; I mean to read him now
until the day I die." And not only in the book but in the author too.
Let us be {69} sure with Carlyle that if "Boswell wrote a good book" it
was not because he was a fool, but on the contrary "because he had a
heart and an eye to discern Wisdom, and an utterance to render it
forth: because of his free insight, of his lively talent, above all of
his love and childlike open-mindedness." In the particular business he
had to carry through, these qualities were an equipment amounting to a
modest kind of genius. They enabled him to produce a book which has
given as much pleasure perhaps to intelligent men as any book that ever
was written. Let us be careful whenever we think of Boswell to
remember this side, the positive, creative, permanent side of him: and
not so careful as our grandfathers generally were, to remember the
other side which ceased to have any further importance on that night in
May 1795 when he ended the fifty-five years of a life in which he had
found time for more follies than most men, for more vices perhaps,
certainly for more wisdom, but also for what most men never so much as
conceive, the preparation and production of a masterpiece.

{70}

CHAPTER III

THE LIVES OF BOSWELL AND JOHNSON

These two men, then, are for ever inseparable. They go down the
centuries together, Johnson owing most of his immortality to the genius
of Boswell, Boswell owing to Johnson that inspiring opportunity without
which genius cannot discover that it is genius. There were othe