friendship, while he, though ever busy and solicitous,
withdraws into the background.

Some think that Boswell, in his Life of Johnson, did not sufficiently
realize his duty of self-effacement. He is too much in evidence,
too bustling, too anxious that his own opinion, though comparatively
unimportant, should get a hearing. In general, Boswell's faults are
easily noticed, and have been too much talked about. He was morbid,
restless, self-conscious, vain, insinuating; and, poor fellow, he died a
drunkard. But the essential Boswell, the skilful and devoted artist, is
almost unrecognized. As the creator of the Life of Johnson he is almost
as much effaced as is Homer in the Odyssey. He is indeed so closely
concealed that the reader suspects no art at all. Boswell's performance
looks easy enough--merely the more or less coherent stringing together
of a mass of memoranda. Nevertheless it was rare and difficult, as is
the highest achievement in art. Boswell is primarily the artist, and
he has created one of the great masterpieces of the world.* He created
nothing else, though his head was continually filling itself with
literary schemes that came to nought. But into his Life of Johnson he
poured all his artistic energies, as Milton poured his into Paradise
Lost, and Vergil his into the Aneid.

* Here I include his Journal of a Tour of the Hebrides as
essentially a part of the Life. The Journal of a Tour in
Corsica is but a propaedeutic study.

First, Boswell had the industry and the devotion to his task of an
artist. Twenty years and more he labored in collecting his material. He
speaks frankly of his methods. He recorded the talk of Johnson and
his associates partly by a rough shorthand of his own, partly by an
exceptional memory, which he carefully trained for this very purpose.
'O for shorthand to take this down!' said he to Mrs. Thrale as they
listened to Johnson; and she replied: 'You'll carry it all in your head;
a long head is as good as shorthand.' Miss Hannah More recalls a gay
meeting at the Garricks', in Johnson's absence, when Boswell was bold
enough to match his skill with no other than Garrick himself in
an imitation of Johnson. Though Garrick was more successful in his
Johnsonian recitation of poetry, Boswell won in reproducing his familiar
conversation. He lost no time in perfecting his notes both mental and
stenographic, and sat up many a night followed by a day of headache,
to write them i