Far from resenting this curious mental dictatorship, his auditors never seem to weary.  They hang upon his words, praise him, flatter him, repeat his judgments all over London the next day, and return in the evening hungry for more.  Whenever the conversation begins to flag, Boswell is like a woman with a parrot, or like a man with a dancing bear.  He must excite the creature, make him talk or dance for the edification of the company.  He sidles obsequiously towards his hero and, with utter irrelevancy, propounds a question of theology, a social theory, a fashion of dress or marriage, a philosophical conundrum:  “Do you think, sir, that natural affections are born with us?” or, “Sir, if you were shut up in a castle and a newborn babe with you, what would you do?” Then follow more Johnsonian laws, judgments, oracles; the insatiable audience clusters around him and applauds; while Boswell listens, with shining face, and presently goes home to write the wonder down.  It is an astonishing spectacle; one does not know whether to laugh or grieve over it.  But we know the man, and the audience, almost as well as if we had been there; and that, unconsciously, is the superb art of this matchless biographer.

When Johnson died the opportunity came for which Boswell had been watching and waiting some twenty years.  He would shine in the world now, not by reflection, but by his own luminosity.  He gathered together his endless notes and records, and began to write his biography; but he did not hurry.  Several biographies of Johnson appeared, in the four years after his death, without disturbing Boswell’s perfect complacency.  After seven years’ labor he gave the world his Life of Johnson.  It is an immortal work; praise is superfluous; it must be read to be appreciated.  Like the Greek sculptors, the little slave produced a more enduring work than the great master.  The man who reads it will know Johnson as he knows no other man who dwells across the border; and he will lack sensitiveness, indeed, if he lay down the work without a greater love and appreciation of all good literature.

LATER AUGUSTAN WRITERS.  With Johnson, who succeeded Dryden and Pope in the chief place of English letters, the classic movement had largely spent its force; and the latter half of the eighteenth century gives us an imposing array of writers who differ so widely that it is almost impossible to classify them.  In general, three schools of writers are noticeable:  first, the classicists, who, under Johnson’s lead, insisted upon elegance and regularity of style; second, the romantic poets, like Collins, Gray, Thomson, and Burns, who revolted from Pope’s artificial couplets and wrote of nature and the human heart[197]; third, the early novelists, like Defoe and Fielding, who introduced a new type of literature.  The romantic poets and the novelists are reserved for special chapters; and of the other writers—­Berkeley and Hume in philosophy; Robertson, Hume, and Gibbon in history; Chesterfield and Lady Montagu in letter writing; Adam Smith in economics; Pitt, Burke, Fox, and a score of lesser writers in politics—­we select only two, Burke and Gibbon, whose works are most typical of the Augustan, i.e. the elegant, classic style of prose writing.