trait it is--perhaps the most complete picture of a
great man ever limned in words.

But for the accident of the Scotch advocate's intimacy with Johnson, and
his devoted admiration of him, the latter would not probably have stood
nearly so high in literature as he now does. It is in the pages of
Boswell that Johnson really lives; and but for Boswell, he might have
remained little more than a name. Others there are who have bequeathed
great works to posterity, but of whose lives next to nothing is known.
What would we not give to have a Boswell's account of Shakspeare? We
positively know more of the personal history of Socrates, of Horace, of
Cicero, of Augustine, than we do of that of Shakspeare. We do not
know what was his religion, what were his politics, what were his
experiences, what were his relations to his contemporaries. The men
of his own time do not seem to have recognised his greatness; and Ben
Jonson, the court poet, whose blank-verse Shakspeare was content
to commit to memory and recite as an actor, stood higher in popular
estimation. We only know that he was a successful theatrical manager,
and that in the prime of life he retired to his native place, where he
died, and had the honours of a village funeral. The greater part of the
biography which has been constructed respecting him has been the result,
not of contemporary observation or of record, but of inference. The best
inner biography of the man is to be found in his sonnets.

Men do not always take an accurate measure of their contemporaries. The
statesman, the general, the monarch of to-day fills all eyes and ears,
though to the next generation he may be as if he had never been. "And
who is king to-day?" the painter Greuze would ask of his daughter,
during the throes of the first French Revolution, when men, great for
the time, were suddenly thrown to the surface, and as suddenly dropt out
of sight again, never to reappear. "And who is king to-day? After all,"
Greuze would add, "Citizen Homer and Citizen Raphael will outlive those
great citizens of ours, whose names I have never before heard of."
Yet of the personal history of Homer nothing is known, and of Raphael
comparatively little. Even Plutarch, who wrote the lives of others: so
well, has no biography, none of the eminent Roman writers who were
his contemporaries having so much as mentioned his name. And so of
Correggio, who delineated the features of others so well, there is not
known to ex