and the volatile curiosity of a man about town with the drudging patience of a chronicler.  With a very good opinion of himself, he was quick in discerning, and frank in applauding the excellencies of others.  His contemporaries, indeed, not without some colour of reason, occasionally complained of him as vain, troublesome, and giddy; but his vanity was inoffensive—­his curiosity was commonly directed towards laudable objects—­when he meddled, be did so, generally, from good-natured motives—­and his giddiness was only an exuberant gaiety, which never failed in the respect and reverence due to literature, morals, and religion’ ’ and posterity grate taste, temper, and talents with which he selected, enjoyed, and described that polished intellectual society which still lives in his work, and without his work had perished!” Mr. Croker’s edition of the work is the eleventh; and since its appearance, a twelfth, in ten pocket volumes, with embellishments has been given to the world, by Mr. Murray, of which thousands are understood to have been called for.  Whenever Walpole, in the course of his correspondence, has had occasion to introduce the name of Boswell, he has uniformly spoken so disparagingly of him, that it is but justice to his memory to append to the above extract, a passage or two, in which other writers have recorded their estimation of him.  Mr. Burke told Sir James Mackintosh, that “he thought Johnson appeared greater in Boswell’s volumes than even in his own.”  Sir Walter Scott, speaking of the Doctor, says, “he yet is, in our mind’s eye, a personification as lively as that of Siddons in Lady Macbeth, or Kemble in Cardinal Wolsey; and all this arises from his having found in Boswell such a biographer as no man but himself ever had.”  In the opinion of the Edinburgh Reviewers, Boswell was “the very prince of retail wits and philosophers,” and his Life of Johnson is pronounced to be “one of the best books in the world—­ a great, a very great work;” while the quarterly Review considers it “the richest dictionary of wit and wisdom, any language can boast, and that to the influence of Boswell we owe, probably, three-fourths of what is most entertaining, as well as no inconsiderable portion of whatever is most instructive, in all the books of memoirs that have subsequently appeared."-E.

(797) Dr. Johnson’s attack upon Gray was undoubtedly calculated to give great offence to Walpole:  “Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where:  he was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him great:  he was a mechanical poet."-E.

(798) This was the “Letter from Mr. Burke to a member of the National Assembly."-E.