So that when he came to his own, when gradually the public whom he despised and neglected raised him into a pontifical position matched by none before him in England and none since save Carlyle, he was sure of himself; success did not spoil him.  His judgment was unwarped by flattery.  The almost passionate tenderness and humanity which lay beneath his gruffness was undimmed.  His personality triumphed in all the fullness and richness which had carried it in integrity through his years of struggle.  For over twenty years from his chair in taverns in the Strand and Fleet Street he ruled literary London, imposed his critical principles on the great body of English letters, and by his talk and his friendships became the embodiment of the literary temperament of his age.

His talk as it is set down by Boswell is his best monument.  It was the happiest possible fate that threw those two men together, for Boswell besides being an admirer and reporter sedulously chronicling all his master said and did, fortunately influenced both the saying and the doing.  Most of us have some one in whose company we best shine, who puts our wits on their mettle and spurs us to our greatest readiness and vivacity.  There is no doubt that Boswell, for all his assumed humility and for all Johnson’s affected disdain, was just such a companion for Johnson.  Johnson was at his best when Boswell was present, and Boswell not only drew Johnson out on subjects in which his robust common sense and readiness of judgment were fitted to shine but actually suggested and conducted that tour in Scotland which gave Johnson an opportunity for displaying himself at his best.  The recorded talk is extraordinarily varied and entertaining.  It is a mistake to conceive Johnson as a monster of bear-like rudeness, shouting down opposition, hectoring his companions, and habitually a blustering verbal bully.  We are too easily hypnotized by Macaulay’s flashy caricature.  He could be merciless in argument and often wrongheaded and he was always acute, uncomfortably acute, in his perception of a fallacy, and a little disconcerting in his unmasking of pretence.  But he could be gay and tender too and in his heart he was a shrinking and sensitive man.

As a critic (his criticism is the only side of his literary work that need be considered), Johnson must be allowed a high place.  His natural indolence in production had prevented him from exhausting his faculties in the more exacting labours of creative work, and it had left him time for omnivorous if desultory reading, the fruits of which he stored in a wonderfully retentive memory against an occasion for their use.  To a very fully equipped mind he brought the service of a robust and acute judgment.  Moreover when he applied his mind to a subject he had a faculty of intense, if fitful concentration; he could seize with great force on the heart of a matter; he had the power in a wonderfully short time of extracting the kernel and leaving the husk.  His judgments