w
regarded as untenable. If fool is a word to describe Boswell (and his
folly was at times transcendent) he wrote his great book because and not
in despite of the fact that he was one. There can be no doubt, in fact,
that he was a biographical genius, and that he arranged his
opportunities just as he prepared his transitions and introduced those
inimitable glosses by which Johnson's motives are explained, his state
of mind upon particular occasions indicated, and the general feeling of
his company conveyed. This remarkable literary faculty, however, was but
a fraction of the total make-up requisite to produce such a masterpiece
as the _Life_. There is a touch of genius, too, in the naif and
imperturbable good nature and persistency ("Sir, I will not be baited
with 'what' and 'why.' 'Why is a cow's tail long?' 'Why is a fox's tail
bushy?'"), and even in the abnegation of all personal dignity, with
which Boswell pursued his hero. As he himself said of Goldsmith, "He had
sagacity enough to cultivate assiduously the acquaintance of Johnson,
and his faculties were gradually enlarged." Character, the vital
principle of the individual, is the _ignis fatuus_ of the mechanical
biographer. Its attainment may be secured by a variety of means--witness
Xenophon, Cellini, Aubrey, Lockhart and Froude--but it has never been
attained with such complete intensity as by Boswell in his _Life of
Johnson_. The more we study Boswell, the more we compare him with other
biographers, the greater his work appears.

The eleventh edition of Boswell's _Johnson_ was brought out by John
Wilson Croker in 1831; in this the original text is expanded by
numerous letters and variorum anecdotes and is already knee-deep in
annotation. Its blunders provoked the celebrated and mutually
corrective criticisms of Macaulay and Carlyle. Its value as an
unrivalled granary of Johnsoniana, stored opportunely before the last
links with a Johnsonian age had disappeared, has not been adequately
recognized. A new edition of the original text was issued in 1874 by
Percy Fitzgerald (who has also written a useful life of James Boswell
in 2 vols., London, 1891); a six-volume edition, including the _Tour_
and Johnsoniana, was published by the Rev. Alexander Napier in 1884;
the definitive edition is that by Dr Birkbeck Hill in 6 vols., 1887,
with copious annotations and a model index. A generously illustrated
edition was completed in 1907 in two larg