circling foolishly, dangerously about it, not knowing what
he wanted. If he enjoyed Highland dinners and toasts, as henchman to a
new sort of chieftain, Henry Erskine, in the domestic "Outer-House,"
could hand him a shilling "for the sight of his Bear." Doubtless the
man was laughed at, and often heard himself laughed at for his
Johnsonism. To be envied, is the grand and sole aim of vulgar vanity;
to be filled with good things is that of sensuality; for Johnson
perhaps no man living _envied_ poor Bozzy; and of good things (except
himself paid for them) there was no vestige in that acquaintanceship.
Had nothing other or better than vanity and sensuality been there,
Johnson and Boswell had never come together, or had soon and finally
separated again....

Consider, too, with what force, diligence, and vivacity, he has
rendered back, all this which, in Johnson's neighborhood, his "open
sense" had so eagerly and freely taken in. That loose-flowing,
careless-looking Work of his is as a picture by one of Nature's own
Artists; the best possible resemblance of a Reality; like the very
image thereof in a clear mirror. Which indeed it was; let but the
mirror be _clear_, this is the great point; the picture must and will
be genuine. 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, by little
and little, unconsciously works together for us a whole _Johnsoniad_;
a more free, perfect, sunlit, and spirit-speaking likeness, than for
many centuries had been drawn by man of man! Scarcely since the days
of Homer has the feat been equaled; indeed, in many senses this also
is a kind of Heroic Poem. The fit _Odyssey_ of our unheroic age was to
be written, not sung; of a Thinker, not a Fighter; and (for want of a
Homer) by the first open soul that might offer,--looked such even
through the organs of a Boswell. We do the man's intellectual
endowments great wrong, if we measure it by its mere logical outcome;
though here, too, there is not wanting a light ingenuity, a
figurativeness, and fanciful sport, with glimpses of insight far
deeper than the common. But Boswell's grand intellectual talent was
(as such ever is) an _unconscious_ one, of far higher reach and
significance than Logic; and showed itself in the whole, not in parts.
Here again we have that old saying verified, "The heart sees farther
than the head."