well, 'will sense make the head ache?' 'Yes, Sir, when it is
not used to it.'

Boswell is also the artist in his regard for truth. In him it was a
passion. Again and again he insists upon his authenticity. He developed
an infallible gust and unerring relish of what was genuinely Johnsonian
in speech, writing, or action; and his own account leads to the
inference that he discarded, as worthless, masses of diverting material
which would have tempted a less scrupulous writer beyond resistance. 'I
observed to him,' said Boswell, 'that there were very few of his friends
so accurate as that I could venture to put down in writing what they
told me as his sayings.' The faithfulness of his portrait, even to
the minutest details, is his unremitting care, and he subjects all
contributed material to the sternest criticism.

Industry and love of truth alone will not make the artist. With only
these Boswell might have been merely a tireless transcriber. But he
had besides a keen sense of artistic values. This appears partly in the
unity of his vast work. Though it was years in the making, though the
details that demanded his attention were countless, yet they all centre
consistently in one figure, and are so focused upon it, that one can
hardly open the book at random to a line which has not its direct
bearing upon the one subject of the work. Nor is the unity of the book
that of an undeviating narrative in chronological order of one man's
life; it grows rather out of a single dominating personality exhibited
in all the vicissitudes of a manifold career. Boswell often speaks of
his work as a painting, a portrait, and of single incidents as pictures
or scenes in a drama. His eye is keen for contrasts, for picturesque
moments, for dramatic action. While it is always the same Johnson whom
he makes the central figure, he studies to shift the background, the
interlocutors, the light and shade, in search of new revelations and
effects. He presents a succession of many scenes, exquisitely wrought,
of Johnson amid widely various settings of Eighteenth-Century England.
And subject and setting are so closely allied that each borrows charm
and emphasis from the other. Let the devoted reader of Boswell ask
himself what glamor would fade from the church of St. Clement Danes,
from the Mitre, from Fleet Street, the Oxford coach, and Lichfield,
if the burly figure were withdrawn from them; or what charm and
illumination, of the man himself would ha