as it may be by
the petty occurrences of daily life, which for them are the analogues
of the stirring incidents that mark the course of the man of public
action, statesman or warrior. The reason is plain; the character of
few rises to the height of their words, written or spoken. These show
their wisdom, or power, and are uplifting; but their shortcomings,
too, have a virtue. We fight the better for appreciating that victors
have known defeat. The supreme gift of biography to mankind is
personality; not what the man thought or did, but what he was. Herein
is inspiration and reproof; motive force, inspiring or deterrent. If
nothing better, mere recognition, or exultation in an excellence to
which we do not attain, has a saving grace of its own.

For the purposes of his biographer, Dr. Johnson scarcely left London.
Beyond a brief visit to Paris, only a tour through the Hebrides; this
an event so colossal in its elevation above the flat level of his
outward existence, like the church towers in a Dutch landscape, that
it is treated as a thing quite apart, has a volume to itself, severed
from its before and after. Boswell gives letters, certainly, and many;
yet, in the matter of character portrayal, what are they alongside of
the talk? And also, more pertinent, what to Boswell was even the talk,
compared with the intercourse to which the talk was incident? In this
he immersed himself and his strong receptive powers, absorbing the
impression which he has so skilfully reproduced. Such apprehension as
Boswell thus gained for himself is no neutral acquirement; it is a
working force, instinctively selective from that on which it feeds,
and intuitive in its power of arrangement. To copy his result is
futile. Like Nelson, there is but one Boswell; but it may be permitted
to believe that lesser men will profit to the extent of their
capacities by adopting his method. This possibly he never formulated,
in that again proving his genius, the unconscious faculty of a very
self-conscious man; but I conceive the process to have been, first
know your subject yourself thoroughly by close contact and sympathy,
and then so handle your material as to bring out to the reader the
image revealed to you.

This is, in a measure, a plea for picturesque treatment of biography
and of history; not by gaudy coloring and violent contrasts, striving
after rhetorical effect, but in the observance of proportion, of
grouping, of subordination to a central