compare his reports with those of less skilful hearers, that we can appreciate the skill with which the essence of a conversation is extracted, and the whole scene indicated by a few telling touches.  We are tempted to fancy that we have heard the very thing, and rashly infer that Boswell was simply the mechanical transmitter of the good things uttered.  Any one who will try to put down the pith of a brilliant conversation within the same space, may soon satisfy himself of the absurdity of such an hypothesis, and will learn to appreciate Boswell’s powers not only of memory but artistic representation.  Such a feat implies not only admirable quickness of appreciation, but a rare literary faculty.  Boswell’s accuracy is remarkable; but it is the least part of his merit.

The book which so faithfully reflects the peculiarities of its hero and its author became the first specimen of a new literary type.  Johnson himself was a master in one kind of biography; that which sets forth a condensed and vigorous statement of the essentials of a man’s life and character.  Other biographers had given excellent memoirs of men considered in relation to the chief historical currents of the time.  But a full-length portrait of a man’s domestic life with enough picturesque detail to enable us to see him through the eyes of private friendship did not exist in the language.  Boswell’s originality and merit may be tested by comparing his book to the ponderous performance of Sir John Hawkins, or to the dreary dissertations, falsely called lives, of which Dugald Stewart’s Life of Robertson may be taken for a type.  The writer is so anxious to be dignified and philosophical that the despairing reader seeks in vain for a single vivid touch, and discovers even the main facts of the hero’s life by some indirect allusion.  Boswell’s example has been more or less followed by innumerable successors; and we owe it in some degree to his example that we have such delightful books as Lockhart’s Life of Scott or Mr. Trevelyan’s Life of Macaulay.  Yet no later biographer has been quite as fortunate in a subject; and Boswell remains as not only the first, but the best of his class.

One special merit implies something like genius.  Macaulay has given to the usual complaint which distorts the vision of most biographers the name of lues Boswelliana.  It is true that Boswell’s adoration of his hero is a typical example of the feeling.  But that which distinguishes Boswell, and renders the phrase unjust, is that in him adoration never hindered accuracy of portraiture.  “I will not make my tiger a cat to please anybody,” was his answer to well-meaning entreaties of Hannah More to soften his accounts of Johnson’s asperities.  He saw instinctively that a man who is worth anything loses far more than he gains by such posthumous flattery.  The whole picture is toned down, and the lights are depressed as well as the shadows.  The truth is that it is unscientific to consider a man as a bundle