and, with an eye to all future
contingencies, his sanction for the publication _in his biography_ of
all Johnson's letters to him. 'When I am dead, sir,' was the reply, 'you
may do as you will.'

'My book,' he writes eagerly to Temple, 'has amazing celebrity. Lord
Lyttelton, Mr Walpole, Mrs Macaulay, and Mr Garrick, have all written me
noble letters about it. There are two Dutch translations going forward.'
General Oglethorpe, an old veteran who had seen service under Prince
Eugene, and the friend of Pope whose verses upon him 'I had read from my
early years,' called upon him and solicited his acquaintance. He became
a sort of literary lion. 'I am really the great man now,' he cries; 'I
have David Hume in the forenoon, Mr Johnson in the afternoon of the same
day. I give admirable dinners and good claret, and the moment I go
abroad again, which will be in a day or two, I set up my chariot. This
is enjoying the fruit of my labours, and appearing like the friend of
Paoli.' Alas for that friend!--he confesses to his correspondent that he
has been 'wild.' The form of this outbreak may be sufficiently seen by
the general reader in the leading questions which at this time Boswell
is found putting to Johnson; for the _Life of Johnson_, as we shall
indicate in its proper place, is no less the life of the biographer,
whose mind was ever seeking to shelter itself under the guidance of a
stronger force, and to effect a moral anchorage or moorings behind the
lee of his great friend. When Bozzy indulges in 'the luxury of noble
sentiments,' he is often known to be courting an indemnity to his
conscience for lax practice. Longfellow makes Miles Standish in his
belligerent mood turn in the Caesar to where the thumb-marks in the
margin proclaimed that the battle was hottest; Boswell often indicates
the decline and fall of the moralist by an apparently undue vein of
pietistic comments.

The next year was to witness the friend of Paoli in his most eccentric
display--the Shakesperian Festival inaugurated by Garrick at Stratford.
By this ludicrous gathering it is that Boswell is known to the mass of
readers who have never cared to know more of 'Corsica Boswell' than what
they can gather from the lively picture of Macaulay. There he is known
only as it were in the gross, to which indeed, as Johnson said of
Milton, the undramatic nature of the essayist's mind was rather prone,
careless as it was or incapable of the finer shades of character.