still leaning upon actual life and history, as in "The Vanity of Human Wishes." If, like his prototype, Ben Jonson, he had been gifted with the power to write dramas, the circle of his experience and attainments would have been complete; and still a vast deal of what Ben put into his plays or its equivalent may be found in the Essays of Johnson.

With this fullness and ripeness of acquisition and development, having proved his powers before the world in writings, the great merit of which was universally acknowledged, Johnson now enters upon a new stage of existence, in which he supports a peculiar character unique in English social history. This was the part, above all others, of the great talker of his time. It is not so much, after this, what Johnson writes as what he says, that engages the attention of his readers. For the remaining twenty years of his life, he is to be known chiefly by his conversational talent, and for our appreciation of this, we are indebted to a person as singular as himself. Of the eight volumes which compose the standard edition of "Boswell's Johnson,” six are taken up with the reports of these conversations. It would be vain to attempt within our present limits to describe them. They exhibit various shades of opinion on almost every subject, moral, social, literary, political, which entered into the thoughts of the age; for they were held with its representative men, its divines, its statesmen, authors, men of fashion, and a herd of others less distinguished, who sought to light their tapers at that abundant flame. Sometimes, indeed,

Johnson talked for effect, or rather risked the appearance of it to draw out all that could be said on a question; he was occasionally rude and repul sive; now and then, prejudiced; but, in general, he appeared the great master of common sense, genial, indulgent, tolerant; dogmatic it is true, but with the dogmatism of a man who had reflected much, and, on topics of moral interest, was not to be lightly shaken in his argument; terse and pointed in his expressions, going directly to the heart of the matter in the language of everyday life.

For a result like this, Johnson, had he foreseen it, might have sacrificed much of his time and inclinations. But Boswell was of great use to Johnson in many ways, and spite of the great diversity in their characters and tempers, was not merely tolerated but grew to be loved by him. Much has been said of the relation between them, and some wonder has been expressed that an intimacy should exist between a man of such mental grandeur and so weak a follower. Perhaps the best solution of the apparent inconsistency may be found in the remark that Johnson was not in all respects so strong, or Boswell so weak as each has been represented. A character so lofty may possibly be conceived admitting of no associates but those of equal height in genius, virtue and attainments. But as such an individual seldom, if ever, exists, the personages to compose his court must be proportionally rare. It is not in the course of ordinary human nature to meet with such select associations. It is a motley world we live in, where the great and

the little in every rank and quality are freely mingled together. Men of vir tue and men of intellect are every day supporting various relations with others of less integrity and inferior intelligence. Nothing is more common in the world than to find what are called great men surrounded by comparatively little men. It may be, as Pope says, that "fools rush in where angels fear to tread;" or that the crafty and designing seek to ally themselves to the powerful from motives of self-interest; or that weakness seeks strength to support itself, while independent greatness stands aloof from its fellows. Jealousy is easily provoked among equals, so that like does not always affect like in the practical conduct of life. Greatness needs the presence of littleness to show its elevation. A vast deal of the machinery of greatness, too, must be worked by inferiors. Now, Boswell stood in various necessary relations to Johnson. In the matter of temperament-of a sound physical constitution, eager for enjoyment, pursuing with zest the good, and alas some of the evil things of life-his animal spirits were a corrective of the habitual melancholy of Johnson. He came at intervals of his busy existence to cheer the lonely sage with gossip of the world, not only of London, where he was admitted to the best society, but of his northern home, and of the continent where he had visited Voltaire, and become intimate with the popular hero of the day in his island fastness-the patriotic Paoli. There was no better reporter of the humors of men than Boswell, and no one, so easily as Johnson, could sift

the grain of wheat from his absur dities. When Johnson was in company, who so useful as Boswell to. divert the stream of conversation into the proper channel to-float the great Leviathan of the deep? He was as necessary to the chief talker of the evening as the inferior clown to the master joker in the ring, the provoker and victim of his wit. He was wil ling to suffer anything in the way of rebuke and mortification, that his admired luminary might shine with the greater lustre. We may not always respect the voluntary slave, but we must often be thankful to him for what he accomplished, when his im pertinent nonsense elicited the wisdom of his master. How was the fully charged electrical machine to display its vigor unless an obsequious hand was extended to receive the shock? What Sancho Panza was to Don Quix ote, his page to Falstaff, his squire to Hudibras, Boswell was to Johnson.

But no man had more illustrious friends than Johnson; and Boswell, had he been suddenly carried off after that first unpromising interview in Davies' back parlor, would have been a greater loss to posterity than to him; for had he not his Club-"The Club"

with Garrick and Goldsmith, Reynolds and Burke, and a host of associates worthy of their society for members; and for long years another home of his own in the hospitable mansion of his friend Thrale, a man of wealth, sympathizing with men of letters, where also he found a still more attractive species of Boswell, spiced with the piquant humors of her sex, in the fair Mrs. Thrale, bet

ter known by her later matrimonial designation, Hester Lynch Piozzi. As in the case of Boswell, she was sufficiently distinguished by her intellectual attainments to qualify her for a partial appreciation of the greater mind of Johnson.

We must now pass rapidly over the remaining incidents in the life now hastening to its close. The long-promised edition of Shakspeare was published in 1765. It was not a great achievement in critical or learned illustration of the text; but it is memorable in English literature for its noble preface, in which Johnson, forgetting the limitations of his own poor dramatic talent in "Irene," interprets as no one ever more knowingly and feelingly interpreted, the transcendent genius of the author whom he had so eloquently pictured in verse:

"Each change of many-colour'd life he drew, Exhausted worlds, and then imagin'd new; Existence saw him spurn her bounded reign, And panting Time toil'd after him in vain."

After an interval of ten years he published "A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland," an account of a tour which he had made with Boswell in the autumn of 1773. He was in his sixty-fourth year, in the height of his London fame, and the excursion for him or any other man was then considered quite an extraordinary undertaking. The expedition had been talked of for years. In 1764, when he was visiting at Ferney, Boswell had mentioned the design to Voltaire. "He looked at me," says he, "as if I had talked of going to the North Pole, and said, 'You do not insist on my accompanying you?' 'No,

sir.'

'Then I am very willing you should go."" At the present day a great deal of the amusement of Johnson's book exists in the air of importance given to a journey which is gone through with every season by hundreds of cockney tourists, and which, even in Johnson's time, had no more inconvenience than a trifling excur sion to the Adirondacks, or other par tially settled mountain district has now in our own country. The travelers started together in August from Edinburgh, where Johnson joined Boswell, pursued their way along the eastern coast of Scotland by St. Andrews, Dundee, Aberdeen, and the region bordering the Murray Frith to Inverness, the last place which then, says Johnson, “had a regular communication by high roads with the southern counties." There they bade adieu to post-chaises and "mounted their steeds," traversing the rock-hewn road by the side of Lough Ness to its southern extremity, whence they crossed the Highland region, a simple two days' journey, to the western coast, coming out at Glenelg, opposite the Isle of Sky. This and the adjacent Island of Raasay were pretty thoroughly explored, while Johnson was nobly entertained by the Macleods, the hereditary clansmen. In Sky his Jacobite predilections were gratified. by an introduction to Flora Macdonald, the good angel of the Pretender after the rebellion of '45, and he had the sublime satisfaction of sleeping in the very bed which Charles Edward had passed a night in, when, in the disguise of her female attendant, he had been conducted by his fair guar

in the execution, the design was expanded, especially in the more important subjects, into the full biographies and elaborate critical and philosophical discussions which render the series in the estimate of Boswell, generally admitted by the reading world, "the richest, most beautiful, and, indeed, most perfect production of Johnson's pen." Exceptions may be taken to particular opinions, to the political prejudices in the case of Milton, and his singular want of appreciation of the poetical powers of Gray, some of whose finest verses he treats with the levity and ignorance of a pert school-boy; but upon the whole, especially where the topics fall within the range of common life, where opportunity is afforded for sympathy with humanity, the great test of biographic excellence, the "Lives" may be read with admiration and delight. In the style Johnson is at his best. As he grew older, his mind seems to have worked itself clear of its early incumbrances. We no longer meet with the artificial mannered tone of the "Rambler." He was full of his subject, and enters upon the narration with the ease of conversation. There is no other book in the English language equally great, it has been observed, produced between the age of sixty-eight and seventy-two. It was the last harvest of the author's genius; and the work is marked on many a page with the most touching expressions of feeling. In writing the lives of others he was portraying his own.

The career was soon to be brought to a close. Some of the most illustrious of his friends were preceding

him to the grave. Goldsmith died in 1774, Garrick in 1779, and Thrale was called away, the greatest affliction of the kind which could have befallen him, for it deprived him of a home, in 1781. In the year following, his own household was invaded, in the death of Robert Levett, a humble physician of the lower classes, to whom, with the blind Miss Williams, another unhappy victim of poverty, Mrs. Demoulins, and yet other nondescripts, agreeing in nothing but their common misery, he had charitably given a home. The inmates were constantly annoying him with their quarrels; but even this disturbance had become a kind of relief to his loneliness. In a copy of verses of singular feeling, he paid a tribute to the lowly worth of Levett, which will outlive many compliments to the great who in their life-time would have looked down with contempt upon their subject.

Compare the treatment of the noble Chesterfield with that of the insignificant Levett, and you may take the measure of Johnson's pride and humility, honest virtues both, one supporting the other. There was something heroic in the magnanimity of Johnson towards the poor and suffering. The incident will, while his name lasts, never be forgotten, of his bearing home with him on his back, through Fleet street, a poor victim of disease and ignominy, which Hazlitt, in one of his lectures to a London audience, pronounced "an act worthy of the good Samaritan."

In the summer before he died, in August, 1774, Dr. Johnson paid his last visit to his old home at Lichfield.