as greater in Boswell's books than in his own, the absence of
the terse and artistic touch to the sayings of the Rambler in the pages
of Hawkins, Thrale, Murphy and others, suggest inevitably that they have
been touched up by their reporter. The _Boswelliana_ supplies here some
slight confirmation of this, for there have been preserved in that
collection stories that reappear in the _Life_, and the final form in
which they appear in the later book is always that of a pointed and
improved nature. It would, therefore, seem that Boswell, whose
imitations of Johnson Mrs Thrale declared in some respects superior to
Garrick's, in his long devotion to the style and manner of his friend,
'inflated with the Johnsonian ether,' did consciously or otherwise add
much to the originals, and so has denied himself a share of what would
otherwise be justly, if known, set down to his credit.

'I own,' he writes in 1789 to Temple, 'I am desirous that my life should
tell.' He counted doubtless on the _Autobiography_ for this purpose. 'It
is a maxim with me,' said the great Bentley, 'that no man was ever
written out of reputation but by himself.' At first sight it would
appear that Boswell had inflicted upon his own fame an indelible blot.
From whom but himself should we ever have learned those failings, of
which Macaulay has deftly made so much in his unsympathetic writing down
of the man, after the manner of the Johnsonian attack on Milton and
Gray? In whom but himself should we detect the excrescences in his
works--the permutations and combinations in shaving, the wish for a
pulley in bed to raise him, his puzzle over the disproportionate wages
of footmen and maidservants, his boastings, his family pride, his
hastily writing in the sage's presence Johnson's parody of Hervey in the
_Meditations on a Pudding_, his superstitions, and his weaknesses? It is
this that has cost him so dear with the critics, and the superior
people, 'empty wearisome cuckoos, and doleful monotonous owls,
innumerable jays also and twittering sparrows of the housetops.' He
compares his own ideas to his handwriting, irregular and sprawling; his
nature to Corinthian brass, made up of an infinite variety of
ingredients, and his head to a tavern which might have been full of
lords drinking Burgundy, but has been invaded by low punch-drinkers whom
the landlord cannot expel. Blots and inequalities there are in the great
book. Cooper off the prairie, Galt out of Ayrshire, a