ily raise men to eminence as writers
Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single
remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society which is
not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary
gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates,
may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would
be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to
argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations
made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we
do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of
fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he
is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those
things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were
utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a
retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and
virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him
conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb,
they have made him immortal.

Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of his fame and in the
enjoyment of a competent fortune, is better known to us than any other
man in history. Everything about him, his coat, his wig, his figure, his
face, his scrofula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his
blinking eye, the outward signs which too clearly marked his approbation
of his dinner, his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-pie with
plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the
posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of
orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his
contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous,
acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his
insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr.
Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hodge and the negro Frank, all
are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded
from childhood....

From nature, he had received an uncouth figure, a diseased constitution,
and an irritable temper. The manner in which the earlier years of his
manhood had been passed had given to his demeanour, and even to his
moral character, some peculiarities appalling to the civilised beings
who w