that he appeared at the Shakespeare Jubilee with a riband imprinted “Corsica Boswell” round his hat, and, in short, if you will, lived no day of his life without saying and doing more than one pretentious ineptitude, all this unhappily is evident as the sun at noon.  The very look of Boswell seems to have signified so much.  In that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over his weaker fellow-creatures, partly to snuff up the smell of coming pleasure and scent it from afar, in those big cheeks, hanging like half-filled wine-skins, still able to contain more, in that coarsely-protruded shelf mouth, that fat dew-lapped chin; in all this who sees not sensuality, pretension, boisterous imbecility enough?  The underpart of Boswell’s face is of a low, almost brutish character.’

This is character-painting with a vengeance.  Portrait of a Scotch laird by the son of a Scotch peasant.  Carlyle’s Boswell is to me the very man.  If so, Carlyle’s paradox seems as great as Macaulay’s, for though Carlyle does not call Boswell a great fool in plain set terms, he goes very near it.  But he keeps open a door through which he effects his escape.  Carlyle sees in Bozzy ’the old reverent feeling of discipleship, in a word, hero-worship.’

’How the babbling Bozzy, inspired only by love and the recognition and vision which love can lend, epitomizes nightly the words of Wisdom, the deeds and aspects of Wisdom, and so, little by little, unconsciously works together for us a whole “Johnsoniad”—­a more free, perfect, sunlit and spirit-speaking likeness than for many centuries has been drawn by man of man.’

This I think is a little overdrawn.  That Boswell loved Johnson, God forbid I should deny.  But that he was inspired only by love to write his life, I gravely question.  Boswell was, as Carlyle has said, a greedy man—­and especially was he greedy of fame—­and he saw in his revered friend a splendid subject for artistic biographic treatment.  Here is where both Macaulay and Carlyle are, as I suggest, wrong.  Boswell was a fool, but only in the sense in which hundreds of great artists have been fools; on his own lines, and across his own bit of country, he was no fool.  He did not accidentally stumble across success, but he deliberately aimed at what he hit.  Read his preface and you will discover his method.  He was as much an artist as either of his two famous critics.  Where Carlyle goes astray is in attributing to discipleship what was mainly due to a dramatic sense.  However, theories are no great matter.

Our means of knowledge of James Boswell are derived mainly from himself; he is his own incriminator.  In addition to the life there is the Corsican tour, the Hebrides tour, the letters to Erskine and to Temple, and a few insignificant occasional publications in the shape of letters to the people of Scotland, etc.  With these before him it is impossible for any biographer to approach Bozzy in a devotional attitude; he was all Carlyle calls him.  Our sympathies are with his father, who despised him, and with his son, who was ashamed of him.  It is indeed strange to think of him staggering, like the drunkard he was, between these two respectable and even stately figures—­the Senator of the Court of Justice and the courtly scholar and antiquary.  And yet it is to the drunkard humanity is debtor.  Respectability is not everything.