dear Sir, I would fain be a good man; and I am very good
now. I fear God, and honour the King; I wish to do no ill, and to be
benevolent to all mankind.' He looked at me with a benignant indulgence;
but took occasion to give me wise and salutary caution. 'Do not, sir,
accustom yourself to trust to _impressions_.' Boswell had surely
forgotten all this when he cries bitterly to Temple that he was inclined
to agree with him in thinking 'my great oracle did allow too much credit
to good principles, without good practice.' Perhaps he remembered
Johnson's appreciation of Campbell, the good pious man that never passed
a church without pulling off his hat, all which shewed 'he has good
principles.' Boswell had, unfortunately, been 'caught young' by the
sceptical talk of Dempster, Hume, and Wilkes, and his extended
Continental ramble had impaired the earlier views under which he had
been reared.

But James Boswell deserves at the hands of his readers and of critics
better treatment than has been measured out to him in the contemptuous
estimate of Macaulay, and, still worse, in the shrill attack of the
smaller brood 'whose sails were never to the tempest given,' but who
have, by the easy repetition of a few phrases and an imperfect
acquaintance with the writings and character of the man they decry, come
to the complacent depreciation which, as Niebuhr said, is ever so dear
to the soul of mediocrity. If James Boswell was not like Goldsmith, a
great man, as Johnson finely pronounced, whose frailties should not be
remembered, nor was, perhaps, in any final sense a great writer, yet for
twenty years he had been the tried friend of the man who at the Mitre
had called out to him, 'Give me your hand, I have taken a liking to
you.' A plant that, like Goldsmith also, 'flowered late,' he has created
in literature and biography a revolution, and produced a work whose
surpassing merits and value are known the more that it is studied.

CHAPTER VIII

IN LITERATURE

'Eclipse is first, the rest nowhere.'--MACAULAY.

'How delicate, decent is English Biography,' says Carlyle, 'bless its
mealy mouth! A Damocles sword of Respectability hangs for ever over the
poor English Life-writer (as it does over poor English Life in general),
and reduces him to the verge of paralysis. Thus it has been said there
are no English lives worth reading, except those of Players, who by the
nature of the case have bidden Respectability good-day. The En