out fear or complaint, without
boast or noise, he fairly joined issue with the world and overcame it.
He scorned circumstance, and laid bare the unvarying realities of the
contest. He was ever the sworn enemy of speciousness, of nonsense, of
idle and insincere speculation, of the mind that does not take seriously
the duty of making itself up, of neglect in the gravest consideration of
life. He insisted upon the rights and dignity of the individual man,
and at the same time upon the vital necessity to him of reverence
and submission, and no man ever more beautifully illustrated their
interdependence, and their exquisite combination in a noble nature.

Boswell's Johnson is consistently and primarily the life of one man.
Incidentally it is more, for through it one is carried from his own
present limitations into a spacious and genial world. The reader there
meets a vast number of people, men, women, children, nay even animals,
from George the Third down to the cat Hodge. By the author's magic each
is alive, and the reader mingles with them as with his acquaintances.
It is a varied world, and includes the smoky and swarming courts and
highways of London, its stately drawing-rooms, its cheerful inns,
its shops and markets, and beyond is the highroad which we travel in
lumbering coach or speeding postchaise to venerable Oxford with its
polite and leisurely dons, or to the staunch little cathedral city of
Lichfield, welcoming back its famous son to dinner and tea, or to the
seat of a country squire, or ducal castle, or village tavern, or the
grim but hospitable feudal life of the Hebrides. And wherever we go
with Johnson there is the lively traffic in ideas, lending vitality and
significance to everything about him.

A part of education and culture is the extension of one's narrow range
of living to include wider possibilities or actualities, such as may be
gathered from other fields of thought, other times, other men; in short,
to use a Johnsonian phrase, it is 'multiplicity of consciousness.' There
is no book more effective through long familiarity to such extension and
such multiplication than Boswell's Life of Johnson. It adds a new world
to one's own, it increases one's acquaintance among people who think, it
gives intimate companionship with a great and friendly man.

The Life of Johnson is not a book on first acquaintance to be read
through from the first page to the end. 'No, Sir, do YOU read books
through?' asked Jo