more impassioned in his seriousness than Johnson, but he had a grimness which Johnson did not possess, and he had not Johnson’s good-natured tolerance for foolish and well-meaning people.  Carlyle himself had a good deal of Boswell’s own gift, a power of minute and faithful observation, and a memory which treasured and reproduced characteristic details.  If Carlyle had ever had the time or the taste to admire any human being as Boswell admired Johnson, he might have produced fully as great a book; but Carlyle had a prophetic impulse, an instinct for inverting tubs and preaching from them, a desire for telling the whole human race what to do and how to do it, which Johnson was too modest to claim.

There is but one other instance that I know in English literature of a man who had the Boswellian gift to the full, but who never had complete scope, and that was Hogg.  If Hogg could have spent more of his life with Shelley, and had been allowed to complete his book, we might, I believe, have had a monument of the same kind.

But in the case of Boswell and Johnson, it is Boswell’s magnificent scorn of reticence which has done the trick, like the spurt of acid, of which Browning speaks in one of his best similes.  The final stroke of genius which has established the Life of Johnson so securely in the hearts of English readers, lies in the fact that Boswell has given us something to compassionate.  As a rule the biographer cannot bear to evoke the smallest pity for his hero.  The absence of female relatives in the case of Johnson was probably a part of his good fortune.  No biographer likes, and seldom dares, to torture the sensibilities of a great man’s widow and daughters.  And the strength as well as the weakness of the feminine point of view is that women have a power not so much of not observing, as of actually obliterating the weaknesses of those whom they love.  It is sentiment which ruins biographies, the sentiment that cannot bear the truth.

Boswell did not shrink from admitting the reader to a sight of Johnson’s hypochondria, his melancholy fears, his dreary miseries, his dread of illness, his terror of death.  Johnson’s horror of annihilation was insupportable.  He so revelled in life, in the contact and company of other human beings, that he once said that the idea of an infinity of torment was preferable to the thought of annihilation.  He wrote, in his last illness, to his old friend Dr. Taylor: 

“Oh! my friend, the approach of death is very dreadful.  I am afraid to think on that which I know I cannot avoid.  It is vain to look round and round for that help which cannot be had.  Yet we hope and hope, and fancy that he who has lived to-day may live to-morrow.  But let us learn to derive our hope only from God.

“In the meantime, let us be kind to one another.  I have no friend now living but you and Mr. Hector that was the friend of my youth.—­ Do not neglect, sir, yours affectionately, Sam.  Johnson.”