recognisable, therefore, by everyone; nay, apt even, so strange
had they grown, to be confounded with the very vices they lay
contiguous to and had sprung out of. That he was a wine-bibber and
good liver, gluttonously fond of whatever would yield him a little
solacement, were it only of a stomachic character, is undeniable
enough. That he was vain, heedless, a babbler, had much of the
sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio, curiously spiced, too,
with an all-pervading dash of the coxcomb; that he gloried much
when the tailor by a court suit had made a new man of him; that he
appeared at the Shakespeare Jubilee with a riband imprinted
"Corsica Boswell" round his hat, and, in short, if you will, lived
no day of his life without saying and doing more than one
pretentious ineptitude, all this unhappily is evident as the sun at
noon. The very look of Boswell seems to have signified so much. In
that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over his weaker
fellow-creatures, partly to snuff up the smell of coming pleasure
and scent it from afar, in those big cheeks, hanging like
half-filled wine-skins, still able to contain more, in that
coarsely-protruded shelf mouth, that fat dew-lapped chin; in all
this who sees not sensuality, pretension, boisterous imbecility
enough? The underpart of Boswell's face is of a low, almost brutish
character.'

This is character-painting with a vengeance. Portrait of a Scotch
laird by the son of a Scotch peasant. Carlyle's Boswell is to me the
very man. If so, Carlyle's paradox seems as great as Macaulay's, for
though Carlyle does not call Boswell a great fool in plain set terms,
he goes very near it. But he keeps open a door through which he
effects his escape. Carlyle sees in Bozzy 'the old reverent feeling of
discipleship, in a word, hero-worship.'

'How the babbling Bozzy, inspired only by love and the recognition
and vision which love can lend, epitomizes nightly the words of
Wisdom, the deeds and aspects of Wisdom, and so, little by little,
unconsciously works together for us a whole "Johnsoniad"--a more
free, perfect, sunlit and spirit-speaking likeness than for many
centuries has been drawn by man of man.'

This I think is a little overdrawn. That Boswell loved Johnson, God
forbid I should deny. But that he was inspired only by love to write
his life, I gravely question. Boswell was, as Carlyle has sa