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The Life makes four large octavo volumes, each of some 500 pages, in the great Oxford Edition by Birkbeck Hill: and the Tour to the Hebrides makes a fifth. That is a big book: yet so perfect an artist is Boswell, that scarcely once for a single page in all the five volumes is the chief light turned in any direction except that of Johnson.
William Herndon, the young lawyer already quoted, whom he took into partnership in 1845, and who kept on the business of the firm in Springfield till Lincoln's death. This gentleman was, like Boswell, of opinion that a great man is not best portrayed as a figure in a stained-glass window.
When reminded of his promise, he said that he had ordered dinner at home with Mrs. Williams. Entreaties of the warmest kind from Boswell softened the peevish old lady, to whose pleasure Johnson had referred him. Boswell flew back, announced Mrs. Williams's consent, and Johnson roared, "Frank, a clean shirt!" and was soon in a hackney-coach.
When Doctor Samuel Johnson was told that Boswell proposed to write his life, he threatened to prevent it by taking that of his would-be biographer. It were curious to consider what "crabbed old Carlyle" would have done had he suspected the danger of falling into the hands of a literary backstairs Mrs. Grundy like Edmund Gosse!
Bozzy was in consequence viewed as 'a very close young man, a trait that at no time of his life was ever applicable to James Boswell, on whom, indeed, the advice given by Sir Henry Wotton to Milton would have been thrown away. Putting out to sea in a Tuscan vessel bound for Capo Corso for wine, he had two days to spend on board in consequence of a dead calm.
Lease is a most excellent and amiable lady; but the idea of a man, made in the image of his Maker, being reduced to the social state of a drone-bee is most depressing. Among that worthy class of people referred to somewhat ironically as "the reading public," Boswell is read, but Johnson never.
He is writing no doubt of Boswell; yet, as Lord Auchinleck had been married more than six years, it is odd his wife should be called new. Boswell, a year earlier, wrote to Temple of his hopes from Lord Pembroke: 'How happy should I be to get an independency by my own influence while my father is alive! Letters of Boswell, p. 182. Johnson, in a second letter to Mrs.
Boswell gasped, with every sacred thing at stake. "I have come." "For what Max?" "To to thank you, if I can. To to tell you my story." In the outer room Toky artistically held the dinner back. The honourable master and his strange but equally honourable friend must not be disturbed.
Hawkins Browne joined heartily with him in sentiment; he spoke with much feeling upon it, and pronounced it to be barbarous, and contrary to every principle of morality and religion. Mr. Boswell, after saying the planters would urge that the Africans were made happier by being carried from their own country to the West Indies, observed, "Be it so.
He was a member of "The Club" and a friend of Reynolds and Fox: but his feeling for Johnson was apparently one of fear unmingled with love. Though he met them both fairly often, he never mentions Boswell, and Johnson only once or twice.
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