anecdotes, however, could not render more strong than it is the testimony conveyed by Boswell to the undoubted contempt in which Goldsmith was held by his contemporaries. This contempt Boswell shared with the rest. But the severity with which he has been visited for it, seems hardly deserved when it is considered that the whole of his passages about Goldsmith put together, do not contain half as much acid as the verse of Garrick, or half as much cynical contempt as the sentence of Walpole. Boswell may well be excused for not having lived many years after his time; for many years it took to render Goldsmith appreciated as he is now appreciated, in spite of the admiration professed by Johnson in his epitaph, and which was endorsed by the signatures of the Round Robin.

The charge of abject toadyism has been preferred repeatedly and ably against Boswell. But it is almost invariably preferred through his connection with Johnson. His love of the friendship of those who had achieved fame or notoriety has been pointed out, but without much contempt; his heterogeneous assemblage of acquaintances, of Paoli and Lloyd, of Churchill and Wilkes, of Bickerstaff and Murphy, of Robert Levett and the keeper of Newgate, has been laughed at, but without much scorn for the passion which led him into such diversified society. It is as the biographer of Dr. Johnson that he is ridiculed as a toady; and yet it is certain that this charge has been advanced without fair consideration of the nature of the duties he had imposed upon himself. Than these duties nothing could be more difficult, nothing more delicate. Johnson turned friendless into London with nothing to live upon but an undigested mass of desultory reading, had been forced to battle through every form of complicated indigence ere he reached even the phantom of independence. He who could find no friend when friendship would have been serviceable, turned a suspicious eye on friendship when it was offered after it was no longer needed. Capricious, irritable, contemptuous, his friends were forced to accept him as he himself had said every man should accept life-on the conditions under which he offered himself. Objectionable as those conditions might be, those who surrounded him felt them a light and easy restraint, when taken with the advantages which his friendship conferred. He had powers adequate to the highest occasions. He had a mind so copiously stored that even his bigotry is made profitable by the marrowy juices with which it is full fraught. He had abilities which set him at the head of an assembly comprising the most eminent professors the poetry, art, wit, and humour of the age had produced. It was but natural, that the admiration he excited and the submission he enforced

should have been enthusiastically participated in by one whose mind was peculiarly adapted to appreciate his, and whose admiration was being constantly renewed and as constantly heightened by his unwearied attention to all that was said and all that was done by him whose life he had early resolved to write.

To collect materials for such a life was an occupation Boswell could not have pursued clandestinely. Memory might prove treacherous; it might be impossible to carry from the dinner-table all the good things, in their natural sequence of conversation, that had been said around it. To ensure veracity it was plain that notes of the conversation must be taken on the spot; and this mode of reporting could not escape the attention of the man whose words were being vigilantly set down. Johnson's capriciousness, his independence, and certainly his suspicion, would have made him savagely prohibit a less ingenious diplomatist than Boswell from violating what he himself would call the social statutes of domestic life, by committing to paper, for ultimate publicity, the conversations which were designed for hours dedicated to the relaxation of friendly gatherings. But with all Boswell's tact he came in for rebuffs which would have demolished a man of less pliability. "I will not be put to the question!" shouted the surly philosopher once, in reply to a number of Boswell's nimble but puerile questions asked in rapid succession. "Don't you con. sider, sir, that these are not the manners of a gentleman? I will not be baited with what and why. What is this? What is that? Why is a cow's tail long? Why is a fox's tail bushy?" "Why, sir," said Boswell, "you are so good that I venture to trouble you." "Sir," said Johnson, "my being so good is no reason for your being so ill."

Boswell's submission to such rebuffs, undoubtedly reads with but little credit to his character. But (1), rebuffs of a much coarser kind than these were being constantly administered by Johnson to men with whom he still remained very good friends. Take such illustrations as these:-Murphy and Johnson were conversing near the side of the scenes during the performance of "King Lear." Garrick coming off the stage, exclaimed, "You talk so loud, you destroy all my feelings.”—“ Prithee,” said Johnson, “do not talk of feelings; Punch has no feelings."-Johnson was dining one day at Sir Joshua Reynolds' with a large and distinguished company, amongst whom was Mr. Israel Wilkes, brother of the "patriot." During the conversation Wilkes was about to make some remark, when Johnson's hatred of Wilkes' belongings breaking forth, he stopped him, exclaiming, "I hope, sir, what you are about to say may be better worth hearing than what you have said.”—A Mr. Elliott, a barrister and a

man of fashion, happening to speak in Dr. Johnson's presence with approbation of the laws and government of Venice, "Yes, sir," said Johnson, "all republican rascals think as you do."-Dr. Barnard, a worthy divine holding a high position in the Church of England, ventured before a large company to state his opinion to Dr. Johnson that men never improved after the age of forty-five. "That's not true, sir," said Johnson; "You, who are, perhaps, forty-eight, may still improve if you will try. I wish you would set about it; and I am afraid there is great room for it.”—Such instances may be multiplied. Boswell's book is full of them, and they form the chief portion of the innumerable ana going under Johnson's name. And yet it was Johnson who laid it down as a maxim, "never to speak of a man in his own presence. It is always indelicate and may be offensive." If Boswell was not knocked down by Johnson's fist or cudgel, he was certainly more lucky than others who annoyed the doctor. And (2), it is to be remembered that Boswell was already far advanced in his book, when he was met by the petulance and insolence of his hero. It had already cost him much labour, and certainly much ridicule, to accomplish what he had already done; and it was not to be supposed that he was going to allow the most popular characteristic of Dr. Johnson-his temper-to render so much past work abortive, or to demolish a scheme to the accomplishment of which he had pledged every hope of his heart. Once, and once only, Boswell took serious offence at the doctor's affronts, and absented himself for a week from his society. But a coarse piece of flattery soothed him and won him back. "I said to-day," said the injured man, "to Sir Joshua, when he observed that you tossed me sometimes, I don't care how often or how high he tosses me, when only friends are present, for then I fall upon soft ground; but I do not like falling on stones, which is the case when enemies are present. I think this is a pretty good image, sir."-"Sir," said Johnson, "it is one of the happiest I ever heard."

Whatever prejudice we may entertain towards Boswell, it is impossible to refuse him the merit of being one of the very greatest tacticians on record-a greater than Pope. His admiration of Johnson, his attention, his devotion, his obsequiousness, no doubt induced much of the contempt that has envy for its basis: Robertson protested, and Goldsmith grew angry; but he made no enemies; he lived on good terms with those whose memories he has immortalised, with Langton and Beauclerk, with Nugent and Davies, with a host of people who would never have been heard of but for him. And it is certain that whatever secret feelings may have animated them towards each other, between Boswell and Goldsmith there is no evi

dence to show that any avowed hostility or even dislike whatever subsisted.

It is no doubt his complete, and perhaps unparalleled, ingenuousness, that has procured him so much contempt. A perfect tactician in his conduct, he was as simple, and sometimes as silly in his writings as Goldsmith, whom he laughed at, was in his conversation. Many of his comments on Johnson's sayings really justify Lord Macaulay's criticism that he had "no wit, no humour," and exhibit him in as ridiculous a light as Mr. Croker is exhibited by many of the notes to his edition of the Life. In telling, for instance, the story of Johnson's remarking, in reply to a question, how he felt at the failure of "Irene," "Like the Monument,” he says—“Johnson meant by this that he continued firm and unmoved as that column;" an explanation so ridiculously supererogatory as to imply an insult to the understanding of his readers. His "frame thrills" over the most ponderous, involved, and depressing bits of declamation in the Rambler. Speaking of the preface to the Dictionary, "one of its excellencies," says he, “has always struck me with peculiar admiration; I mean the perspicuity with which he has expressed abstract scientific principles. As an instance of this, I will quote the following sentence: When the radical idea branches out into parallel ramifications, how can a consecutive series be formed, of senses in their own nature collateral?'" Irony could not have done more, had it selected as a specimen of the doctor's perspicuity, his definition of "Network: "— "anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections." He talks of Johnson's books, his manuscripts, his wig, his loose breeches, with the solemn emphasis of a Roman Catholic describing the condition of some canonised bones. In Johnson's lodgings he is Gulliver at Laputa; and his insensibility to the ridiculous is manifested in the artless manner in which he misses the obvious and ludicrous implications of his minute confessions.

His ingenuousness, indeed, is nowhere better illustrated than by his account of his introduction to Johnson at Davies' shop in Covent Garden. It may be confidently asserted that there is nothing in English literature more exquisitely absurd than the particulars of this interview. He had read the Rambler, and he had read Rasselas, and from both these works he had imbibed the most extraordinary notions of the awful being of Johnson. He was possessed, he says, "of a kind of mysterious veneration, by figuring to himself a state of solemn elevated abstraction, in which he supposed him to live in the immense metropolis of London." He was in Davies' back-parlour

when Johnson unexpectedly entered the shop, and Mr. Davies announced his awful approach to him "somewhat in the manner of an actor in the part of Horatio, when he addresses Hamlet on the appearance of his father's ghost, 'Look, my lord, it comes!'" He was much agitated, and begged Davies not to introduce him as a Scotchman. "But," said Davies, roguishly, "he comes from Scotland." "Mr. Johnson," piteously exclaimed Boswell, "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it." Johnson, turning quickly upon him, exclaimed sternly, "That, sir, I find, is what a very great number of your countrymen cannot help." Such candour admits us into a much closer intimacy with him, than his most laboured accounts of himself, his hopes, or his antecedents, procure for us. "One day," he says, "I owned to him that I was occasionally troubled with a fit of narrowness; 'why, sir,' said he, 'so am I, but I do not tell it.' He has now and then borrowed a shilling from me; and when I asked him for it again, seemed to be rather out of humour. A droll little circumstance once occurred, as if he meant to reprimand my minute exactness as a creditor; he thus addressed me: 'Boswell, lend me sixpence-not to be repaid."

It would be begging the question to concede that Boswell was a toady, but that his toadyism was a merit, inasmuch as it was theinstrument of giving to the world one of the most entertaining and instructive books ever written. But this much may fairly be said: that if Boswell was a toady, his toadyism should not be converted into a reproach, since it has been capped by an issue of indefinite profit to English readers. But was Boswell a toady? was his conduct. the insinuating, spaniel-like subserviency it has been declared to be?' Reduced to simple terms, Boswell's iniquity seems to have been a love for notoriety or reputation: a thirst for communion with men distinguished either by genius or activity: by the genius of a Johnson, or the activity of a Wilkes. The obverse of the medal struck. off by nature, representing the old laird of Auchinleck disgusted with his son for cultivating the acquaintance of a man who kept a school and called it an academy, is doubtless droll enough, but it iscertainly more flattering to Boswell than to Boswell's father. It seems to us a pardonable ambition in a young man to solicit with. eagerness though that eagerness was at the onset pusillanimousand to retain through unaffected admiration and veneration the friendship of a philosopher who occupies the most conspicuous position in English letters during the eighteenth century, and whose acquaintance was not less ardently desired by men whom posterity has not yet learnt to accredit with either obsequiousness or meanness