Of Johnson’s poems the reader will have enough if he glance over “The Vanity of Human Wishes.”  His only story, Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, is a matter of rhetoric rather than of romance, but is interesting still to the reader who wants to hear Johnson’s personal views of society, philosophy, and religion.  Any one of his Essays, like that on “Reading,” or “The Pernicious Effects of Revery,” will be enough to acquaint the reader with the Johnsonese style, which was once much admired and copied by orators, but which happily has been replaced by a more natural way of speaking.  Most of his works, it must be confessed, are rather tiresome.  It is not to his books, but rather to the picture of the man himself, as given by Boswell, that Johnson owes his great place in our literature.

BOSWELL’S “LIFE OF JOHNSON”

In James Boswell (1740-1795) we have another extraordinary figure,—­a shallow little Scotch barrister, who trots about like a dog at the heels of his big master, frantic at a caress and groveling at a cuff, and abundantly contented if only he can be near him and record his oracles.  All his life long Boswell’s one ambition seems to have been to shine in the reflected glory of great men, and his chief task to record their sayings and doings.  When he came to London, at twenty-two years of age, Johnson, then at the beginning of his great fame, was to this insatiable little glory-seeker like a Silver Doctor to a hungry trout.  He sought an introduction as a man seeks gold, haunted every place where Johnson declaimed, until in Davies’s bookstore the supreme opportunity came.  This is his record of the great event: 

I was much agitated [says Boswell] and recollecting his prejudice against the Scotch, of which I had heard much, I said to Davies, “Don’t tell him where I come from.”  “From Scotland,” cried Davies roguishly.  “Mr. Johnson,” said I, “I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it."...  “That, sir” [cried Johnson], “I find is what a very great many of your countrymen cannot help.”  This stroke stunned me a good deal; and when we had sat down I felt myself not a little embarrassed, and apprehensive of what might come next.

Then for several years, with a persistency that no rebuffs could abate, and with a thick skin that no amount of ridicule could render sensitive, he follows Johnson; forces his way into the Literary Club, where he is not welcome, in order to be near his idol; carries him off on a visit to the Hebrides; talks with him on every possible occasion; and, when he is not invited to a feast, waits outside the house or tavern in order to walk home with his master in the thick fog of the early morning.  And the moment the oracle is out of sight and in bed, Boswell patters home to record in detail all that he has seen and heard.  It is to his minute record that we owe our only perfect picture of a great man; all his vanity as well as his greatness, his prejudices, superstitions, and even the details of his personal appearance: