He made himself a sort of doormat for his hero, and treasured the dirt that came from the great man’s heavy boots.  No insult levelled at him was too outrageous to be recorded with pride.  “You were drunk last night, you dog,” says Johnson to him one morning during the tour in the Hebrides, and down goes the remark as if he has received the most gracious of good mornings.  “Have you no better manners?” says Johnson on another occasion.  “There is your want.”  And Boswell goes home and writes down the snub together with his apologies.  And so when he has been expressing his emotions on hearing music.  “Sir,” said Johnson, “I should never hear it if it made me such a fool.”

Once indeed he rebelled.  It was when they were dining with a company at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s.  Johnson attacked him, he says, with such rudeness that he kept away from him for a week.  His story of the reconciliation is one of the most delightful things in that astonishing book: 

“After dinner, when Mr. Langton was called out of the room and we were by ourselves, he drew his chair near to mine and said, in a tone of conciliatory courtesy, ‘Well, how have you done?’ Boswell:  ’Sir, you have made me very uneasy by your behaviour to me when we were last at Sir Joshua Reynolds’s.  You know, my dear sir, no man has a greater respect or affection for you, or would sooner go to the end of the world to serve you.  Now, to treat me so—­’ He insisted that I had interrupted him, which I assured him was not the case; and proceeded, ’But why treat me so before people who neither love you nor me?’ Johnson:  ’Well I am sorry for it.  I’ll make it up to you in twenty different ways, as you please.’  Boswell:  ’I said to-day 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 upon stones, which is the case when enemies are present.  I think this is a pretty good image, sir.’  Johnson:  ’Sir, it is one of the happiest I ever have heard.’”

Is there anything more delicious outside Falstaff and Bardolph, or Don Quixote and Sancho Panza?  Indeed, Bardolph’s immortal “Would I were with him wheresoe’er he be, whether in heaven or in hell,” is in the very spirit of Boswell’s devotion to his hero.

It was his failings as much as his talents that enabled him to work the miracle.  His lack of self-respect and humour, his childish egotism, his love of gossip, his naive bathos, and his vulgarities contributed as much to the making of his immortal book as his industry, his wonderful verbal memory, and his doglike fidelity.  I have said that his greatness is only reflected.  But that is hardly just.  It might even be more true to say that Johnson owes his immortality to Boswell.  What of him would remain to-day but for the man who took his scourgings so humbly and repaid them by licking the boot that kicked him?  Who now reads London, or The Vanity of Human Wishes, or The Rambler?  I once read Rasselas, and found it pompous and dull.  And I have read The Lives of the Poets, and though they are not pompous and dull, they are often singularly poor criticism, and the essay on Milton is, in some respects, as mean a piece of work as ever came out of Grub Street.