New Criterion, March 1st, 2001
Peter Martin A Life of James Boswell. Yale University Press, 613 pages $35 Published in 1791, the Life of Samuel Johnson became famous at once, but left everyone baffled that such a tremendous masterpiece could have been produced by James Boswell. The biographer was regarded by those who knew him as a talentless buffoon and by many others as something even less. Macaulay, most famously, pronounced Boswell "one of the smallest men who ever lived ... a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect ... servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot ... a common butt in the taverns ...
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