James Boswell is important for several reasons. His biography of Samuel Johnson is undoubtedly his most celebrated work, and for it he has traditionally been assigned pride of place among biographers. The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (1791) is often said to mark the boundary between old and new biography just as surely as the contemporary revolution in France marked the boundary between old and new political arrangements. But Boswell the writer did much more than just create the most significant biography in modern times. He electrified Great Britain in 1768 with an account of the revolutionary events then taking place on the Mediterranean island of Corsica and later played a significant role in helping Gen. Pasquale di Paoli set up a government in exile in London. In 1785 he enlarged the dimensions of travel literature significantly when he published his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, a work...