stood by the ordinary man.

Carlyle's case is a different one again. There the evidence is mainly
documentary. We know more about the Carlyle interior than we know of
the history of any married pair since the world began. There is little
doubt that if Carlyle could have had a Boswell, a biographer who could
have rendered the effect of his splendid power of conversation, we
might have had a book which could have been put on the same level as
the life of Johnson, because Carlyle again was pre-eminently a
"figure," a man made by nature to hold the enraptured attention of a
circle. But it would have been a much more difficult task to represent
Carlyle's talk than it was to represent Johnson's, because Carlyle was
an inspired soliloquist, and supplied both objection and repartee out
of his own mind. I think it probable that Carlyle was a typical
Scotchman; he was more impassioned in his seriousness than Johnson, but
he had a grimness which Johnson did not possess, and he had not
Johnson's good-natured tolerance for foolish and well-meaning people.
Carlyle himself had a good deal of Boswell's own gift, a power of
minute and faithful observation, and a memory which treasured and
reproduced characteristic details. If Carlyle had ever had the time or
the taste to admire any human being as Boswell admired Johnson, he
might have produced fully as great a book; but Carlyle had a prophetic
impulse, an instinct for inverting tubs and preaching from them, a
desire for telling the whole human race what to do and how to do it,
which Johnson was too modest to claim.

There is but one other instance that I know in English literature of a
man who had the Boswellian gift to the full, but who never had complete
scope, and that was Hogg. If Hogg could have spent more of his life
with Shelley, and had been allowed to complete his book, we might, I
believe, have had a monument of the same kind.

But in the case of Boswell and Johnson, it is Boswell's magnificent
scorn of reticence which has done the trick, like the spurt of acid, of
which Browning speaks in one of his best similes. The final stroke of
genius which has established the Life of Johnson so securely in the
hearts of English readers, lies in the fact that Boswell has given us
something to compassionate. As a rule the biographer cannot bear to
evoke the smallest pity for his hero. The absence of female relatives
in the case of Johnson was probably a part of his good fortune. No
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