the smallest details, his power of hero-worship, his amazing style, his perception, his astonishing memory and the training he gave it, his superb dramatic faculty, which enabled him to arrange his other characters around the main figure, and to subordinate them all to his central emphasis—­all these qualities are undeniable.  Moreover he was himself the most perfect foil and contrast to Johnson that could be imagined, while he possessed in a unique degree the power of both stimulating and provoking his hero to animation and to wrath.  Boswell may not have known what an artist he was, but he is probably one of the best literary artists who has ever lived.

But the supreme quality of his great book is this—­that his interest in every trait of his hero, large and small, is so strong that he had none of that stiff propriety or chilly reserve which mars almost all English biographies.  He did not care a straw whether this characteristic or that would redound to Johnson’s credit.  He saw that Johnson was a large-minded, large-hearted man, with an astonishing power of conversational expression, and an extremely picturesque figure as well.  He perceived that he was big enough to be described in full, and that the shadows of his temperament only brought out the finer features into prominence.

Since the days of Johnson there are but two Englishmen whose lives we know in anything like the same detail—­Ruskin and Carlyle.  We know the life of Ruskin mainly from his own power of impassioned autobiography, and because he had the same sort of power of exhibiting both his charm and his weakness as Boswell had in dealing with Johnson.  But Ruskin was not at all a typical Englishman; he had a very feminine side to his character, and though he was saved from sentimentality by his extreme trenchancy, and by his irritable temper, yet his whole temperament is beautiful, winning, attractive, rather than salient and picturesque.  He had the qualities of a poet, a quixotic ideal, and an exuberant fancy; but though his spell over those who understand him is an almost magical one, his point of view is bound to be misunderstood by the ordinary man.

Carlyle’s case is a different one again.  There the evidence is mainly documentary.  We know more about the Carlyle interior than we know of the history of any married pair since the world began.  There is little doubt that if Carlyle could have had a Boswell, a biographer who could have rendered the effect of his splendid power of conversation, we might have had a book which could have been put on the same level as the life of Johnson, because Carlyle again was pre-eminently a “figure,” a man made by nature to hold the enraptured attention of a circle.  But it would have been a much more difficult task to represent Carlyle’s talk than it was to represent Johnson’s, because Carlyle was an inspired soliloquist, and supplied both objection and repartee out of his own mind.  I think it probable that Carlyle was a typical Scotchman; he was