ious remains we have of the past are
vanishing like snows before the south wind.

In the Strand there is a great heap of rubbish where, when the war began,
stood two fine old houses of Charles II.'s London. Their disappearance
would, in normal times, have set all the Press in revolt. But they have
gone without a murmur, so preoccupied are we with more urgent matters. And
so with the Elizabethan houses in Cloth Fair. They have been demolished
without a word of protest. And what devastation is afoot in Lincoln's Inn
among those fine reposeful dwellings, hardly one of which is without some
historic or literary interest!

In the midst of all this vandalism it was too much perhaps to hope that
Boswell's house would escape. Bozzy was not an Englishman; his residence in
London was casual, and, what is more to the point, he has only a reflected
greatness. Macaulay's judgment of him is now felt to be too harsh, but even
his warmest advocate must admit that his picture of himself is not
engaging. He was gross in his habits, full of little malevolences (observe
the spitefulness of his references to Goldsmith), and his worship of
Johnson was abject to the point of nausea.

He made himself a sort of doormat for his hero, and treasured the dirt that
came from the great man's heavy boots. No insult levelled at him was too
outrageous to be recorded with pride. "You were drunk last night, you dog,"
says Johnson to him one morning during the tour in the Hebrides, and down
goes the remark as if he has received the most gracious of good mornings.
"Have you no better manners?" says Johnson on another occasion. "There is
_your want_." And Boswell goes home and writes down the snub together with
his apologies. And so when he has been expressing his emotions on hearing
music. "Sir," said Johnson, "I should never hear it if it made me such a
fool."

Once indeed he rebelled. It was when they were dining with a company at Sir
Joshua Reynolds's. Johnson attacked him, he says, with such rudeness that
he kept away from him for a week. His story of the reconciliation is one of
the most delightful things in that astonishing book:

"After dinner, when Mr. Langton was called out of the room and we were by
ourselves, he drew his chair near to mine and said, in a tone of
conciliatory courtesy, 'Well, how have you done?' Boswell: 'Sir, you have
made me very uneasy by your behaviour to me when we were last at Sir Joshua
Reynolds's. You know, my dear sir