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He and Johnson are now linked together for all eternity; and everybody who takes an interest in Johnson is interested in Boswell too. It ought to be much more than interest, and in all true Johnsonians it is. Without Boswell, we should have respected Johnson, honoured him as a man and a writer, liked him as "a true-born Englishman," but we could not have known him enough to love him.
That church still remains; the least altered, perhaps, with the possible exception of the house in Gough Square, of all the buildings which once had the body of Johnson inside them; a place of pilgrimage for many Johnsonians who, refusing to be driven away by the commonplace window which officially honours his memory, are grateful to find the seat he used to occupy marked out for their veneration: and not altogether ungrateful even for the amateur statue which stands in the churchyard, looking towards his beloved Fleet Street.
Alluding to Boswell's Life he continued, "Mine should have been, not the droppings of his lips, but the history of his mind." Field's Life of Parr, i. 164. In the epitaph that he first sent in were found the words 'Probabili Poetae. 'In arms, wrote Parr, 'were all the Johnsonians: Malone, Steevens, Sir W. Scott, Windham, and even Fox, all in arms. The epithet was cold.
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