on the
northern tour, and the result is a masterpiece. Pepys is garrulous,
often vulgar, always lower-middle-class; but Boswell writes like a
gentleman.

Macaulay has explained it by a paradox. Goldsmith was great in spite of
his weaknesses, Boswell by reason of his; if he had not been a great
fool, he would never have been a great writer. He was a dunce, a
parasite, a coxcomb, a Paul Pry, had a quick observation, a retentive
memory, and accordingly--he has become immortal! Alas for the paucity of
such immortals under so common circumstances; their number should be
legion! That a fool may occasionally write interesting matter we know;
but that a man should write a literary classic, graced by arrangement,
selection, expression, is not even paradox but hyperbole run mad. The
truth is, Macaulay had no eye for such a complex character as Boswell.
Too correct himself, too prone to the cardinal virtues and consistency,
to follow one who, by instinct, seemed to anticipate Wendell Holmes'
advice--'Don't be consistent, but be simply _true_'--and too sound
politically in the field where Boswell and the doctor abased themselves
in absurd party spirit, Macaulay can no more understand sympathetically
the vagaries of Boswell than Mommsen or Drumann can follow the political
inconsistency of Cicero. He had no Boswellian 'delight in that
intellectual chemistry which can separate good qualities from evil in
the same person;' and in his essay on _Milton_ he has disclaimed
explicitly all such hero-worship of the living or the dead and denounced
Boswellism as the most certain mark of an ill-regulated intellect. Nor
had he, or Carlyle either, before him the evidence of the letters to
Temple.

Carlyle, in the theory of hero-worship, has made capital use of Boswell.
He sees the strong mind of Johnson leading 'the poor flimsy little soul'
of James Boswell; he feels 'the devout Discipleship, the gyrating
observantly round the great constellation.' He has Boswell's reiterated
declarations to support him. On one side Carlyle's vindication of the
biographer is successful; he errs in emphasizing the discovery by
Boswell of the Rambler. In such a discovery Langton and Beauclerk had
long preceded him, and the Johnson that Boswell met in Davies' parlour
was the pensioned writer who had out-lived his dark days, and was the
literary dictator of the day, and the associate of Burke and of
Reynolds. But Carlyle comes nearer the truth when he touches on t