he was at Lady Cork's one evening and how much his merriment
annoyed the ladies, how impertinent he was to the Duchess of Argyle and
with what stately contempt she put down his impertinence, how Colonel
Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness, how his
father and the very wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at his
fooleries--all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they
had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicings. All the
caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his
hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a
cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a
fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the
whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill; but assuredly he
has used nobody so ill as himself.

That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world
is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted
themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has
indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works.
Goldsmith was very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an
inspired idiot, and by another as a being

"Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll."

La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come
in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary
eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of
his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have
been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest
and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness,
the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility
to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was
a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own
curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never
scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation
of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense
enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others, or when he
was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has,
in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such
writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.

Of the talents which ordinar