ncient date,' of reliable
biographies whose paucity Carlyle laments, the works of Boswell may be
safely included. Their accuracy is confessed by workers in all fields.
His _Tour_ created a type; no better volume of travels has ever been
written than the _Journal_; and the critic who has dealt at the
reputation of Boswell its heaviest blow has yet to confess, that Homer
is no more the first of poets, Shakespeare the first of dramatists,
Demosthenes the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of
biographers, with no second.

How is this? Written in 1831, before Lockhart Southey and Carlyle by
their biographies of Scott, Nelson, and Frederick had appeared as
rivals, why is it no less true now? What singular gift or quality can
account for this singular aloofness from the ordinary or extraordinary
class of writers? Why does Boswell yet wear the crown of indivisible
supremacy in biography? His own words will not explain it, the
possession of Johnson's intimacy, the twenty years' view of his subject,
his faculty for recollecting, and his assiduity in recording
communications. This and more than this Lockhart possessed, the nearest
rival to the biographical throne. He was the son-in-law of his subject,
for whom he had as true an admiration as Boswell had for Johnson. But
Boswell was only in the company of his idol some 180 days, or 276 if we
include the time on the tour in Scotland, in all the twenty years of his
acquaintance. Lockhart had the journals of Sir Walter, and the
communications of nearly a hundred persons. A comparison in any sense,
literary, social, or moral, would have been felt by Lockhart as an
insult, for he clearly regards Sir Alexander Boswell as a greater man
than his father. But if, like the grandsire of Hubert at Hastings,
Lockhart has drawn a good bow, Boswell, like the Locksley of the
novelist, has notched his shaft, and comparisons have long ceased to be
instituted. Gray has attempted the explanation--a fool with a note-book.
He has invented nothing, he has only reported. But every year sees that
person at work, with his _First Impressions of Brittany_, _Three Weeks
in Greece_, and the everlasting _Tour in Tartanland_. These are the
creations of the note-book, but it has given them no permanence. The
tourist puts in everything he sees, truly enough, or thinks he sees. But
it is the art of Boswell to select 'the characteristical,' and the
typical, to group and to dramatize. Ninety-four days he spent