written. It
is related that the doctor once said that if he thought Boswell meant
to write _his_ life, he should prevent it by taking _Boswell's_. And
yet Johnson's own writings and this biography of him have changed
places in relative importance so completely, that Carlyle predicted
that the former would soon be reduced to notes on the latter; and
Macaulay said that the man who was known to his contemporaries as a
great writer was known to posterity as an agreeable companion.

Johnson was one of those rugged, eccentric, self-developed characters,
so common among the English. He was the son of a Lichfield
book-seller, and after a course at Oxford, which was cut short by
poverty, and an unsuccessful career as a school-master, he had come up
to London, in 1737, where he supported himself for many years as a
book-seller's hack. Gradually his great learning {203} and abilities,
his ready social wit and powers as a talker, caused his company to be
sought at the tables of those whom he called "the great." He was a
clubbable man, and he drew about him at the tavern a group of the most
distinguished intellects of the time, Edmund Burke, the orator and
statesman, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, the portrait painter,
and David Garrick, the great actor, who had been a pupil in Johnson's
school, near Lichfield. Johnson was the typical John Bull of the last
century. His oddities, virtues, and prejudices were thoroughly
English. He hated Frenchmen, Scotchmen, and Americans, and had a
cockneyish attachment to London. He was a high Tory, and an orthodox
churchman; he loved a lord in the abstract, and yet he asserted a
sturdy independence against any lord in particular. He was deeply
religious, but had an abiding fear of death. He was burly in person,
and slovenly in dress, his shirt-frill always covered with snuff. He
was a great diner out, an inordinate tea-drinker, and a voracious and
untidy feeder. An inherited scrofula, which often took the form of
hypochondria and threatened to affect his brain, deprived him of
control over the muscles of his face. Boswell describes how his
features worked, how he snorted, grunted, whistled, and rolled about in
his chair when getting ready to speak. He records his minutest traits,
such as his habit of pocketing the orange peels at the club, and his
superstitious way of {204} touching all the posts between his house and
the Mitre Tavern, going back to do it, if he skipped one