ent to call "the man in the street." The first is, that we should
know nothing about Johnson if it were not for Boswell's famous life, and
the second that Johnson the author is dead, and that our great hero only
lives as a brilliant conversationalist in the pages of Boswell and
others. Boswell's _Life of Johnson_ is the greatest biography in the
English language; we all admit that. It is crowded with incident and
anecdote. Neither Walter Scott nor Rousseau, each of whom has had an
equal number of pages devoted to his personality, lives so distinctly for
future ages as does Johnson in the pages of Boswell. Understanding all
this, we are entitled to ask ourselves what we should have thought of Dr.
Johnson had there been no Boswell; and to this question I do not hesitate
to answer that we should have loved him as much as ever, and that there
would still have been a mass of material with the true Boswellian
flavour. He would not have made an appeal to so large a public, but some
ingenious person would have drawn together all the anecdotes, all the
epigrams, all the touches of that fine humanity, and given us from these
various sources an amalgam of Johnson, that every bookman at least would
have desired to read and study. In Fanny Burney's _Letters and Diaries_
the presentation of Johnson is delightful. I wonder very much that all
the Johnson fragments that Miss Burney provides have not been published
separately. Then Mrs. Thrale has chatted about Johnson copiously in her
"Anecdotes," and these pleasant stories have been reprinted again and
again for the curious. I recall many other sources of information about
the great man and his wonderful talk--by Miss Hawkins, Miss Reynolds,
Miss Hannah More for example--and many of you who have Dr. Birkbeck
Hill's _Johnson Miscellanies_ have these in a pleasantly acceptable form.

My second point is concerned with Dr. Johnson's position apart from all
this fund of anecdote, and this brilliant collection of unforgettable
epigram in Boswell and elsewhere. As a writer, many will tell you, Dr.
Johnson is dead. The thing is absurd on the face of it. There is room
for some disagreement as to his position as a poet. On that question of
poetry unanimity is ever hard to seek; so many mistake rhetoric for
poetry. Only twice at the most, it seems to me, does Dr. Johnson reach
anything in the shape of real inspiration in his many poems, {15}
although it must be admitted that earlier