those bag-cheeks, hanging like half-filled
wine-skins, still able to contain more; in that coarsely protruded
shelf mouth, that fat dewlapped chin; in all this, who sees not
sensuality, pretension, boisterous imbecility enough; much that could
not have been ornamental in the temper of a great man's overfed great
man (what the Scotch name _flunky_), though it had been more natural
there. The under part of Boswell's face is of a low, almost brutish
character....

And now behold the worthy Bozzy, so pre-possessed and held back by
nature and by art, fly nevertheless like iron to its magnet, whither
his better genius called! You may surround the iron and the magnet
with what enclosures and encumbrances you please,--with wood, with
rubbish, with brass: it matters not, the two feel each other, they
struggle restlessly toward each Other, they _will_ be together. The
iron may be a Scottish squirelet, full of gulosity and "gigmanity";
the magnet an English plebeian, and moving rag-and-dust mountain,
coarse, proud, irascible, imperious; nevertheless, behold how they
embrace, and inseparably cleave to one another! It is one of the
strangest phenomena of the past century, that at a time when the old
reverent feeling of Discipleship (such as brought men from far
countries, with rich gifts, and prostrate soul, to the feet of the
Prophets) had passed utterly away from men's practical experience, was
no longer surmised to exist, (as it does,) perennial, indestructible,
in man's inmost heart,--James Boswell should have been the individual,
of all others, predestined to recall it, in such singular guise, to
the wondering, and, for a long while, laughing, and unrecognising
world. It has been commonly said, The man's vulgar vanity was all that
attached him to Johnson; he delighted to be seen near him, to be
thought connected with him. Now let it be at once granted that no
consideration springing out of vulgar vanity could well be absent from
the mind of James Boswell, in this his intercourse with Johnson, or in
any considerable transaction of his life.

At the same time ask yourself: Whether such vanity, and nothing else,
actuated him therein; whether this was the true essence and moving
principle of the phenomenon, or not rather its outward vesture, and
the accidental environment (and defacement) in which it came to light?
The man was, by nature and habit, vain; a sycophant-coxcomb, be it
granted; but had there been nothing more than va