ressive of being very tenderly
affected, replied: "My dear sir, you have always been too good to me."
Immediately afterwards he went away. This was the last circumstance
in the acquaintance of these two eminent men.'

But this is a well-worn theme, though, like some other well-worn themes,
still profitable for edification or rebuke. A hundred years can make no
difference to a character like Johnson's, or to a biography like
Boswell's. We are not to be robbed of our conviction that this man, at
all events, was both great and good.

Johnson the author is not always fairly treated. Phrases are convenient
things to hand about, and it is as little the custom to inquire into
their truth as it is to read the letterpress on banknotes. We are
content to count banknotes, and to repeat phrases. One of these phrases
is, that whilst everybody reads Boswell, nobody reads Johnson. The facts
are otherwise. Everybody does not read Boswell, and a great many people
do read Johnson. If it be asked, What do the general public know of
Johnson's nine volumes octavo? I reply, Beshrew the general public! What
in the name of the Bodleian has the general public got to do with
literature? The general public subscribes to Mudie, and has its
intellectual, like its lacteal sustenance, sent round to it in carts. On
Saturdays these carts, laden with 'recent works in circulation,' traverse
the Uxbridge Road; on Wednesdays they toil up Highgate Hill, and if we
may believe the reports of travellers, are occasionally seen rushing
through the wilds of Camberwell and bumping over Blackheath. It is not a
question of the general public, but of the lover of letters. Do Mr.
Browning, Mr. Arnold, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Trevelyan, Mr. Stephen, Mr. Morley,
know their Johnson? 'To doubt would be disloyalty.' And what these big
men know in their big way hundreds of little men know in their little
way. We have no writer with a more genuine literary flavour about him
than the great Cham of literature. No man of letters loved letters
better than he. He knew literature in all its branches--he had read
books, he had written books, he had sold books, he had bought books, and
he had borrowed them. Sluggish and inert in all other directions, he
pranced through libraries. He loved a catalogue; he delighted in an
index. He was, to employ a happy phrase of Dr. Holmes, at home amongst
books, as a stable-boy is amongst horses. He cared intensely about th