We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book.  Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography.  Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all.  He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect.  Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality by not having been alive when the Dunciad was written.  Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore.  He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame.  He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon.  He was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then “binding it as a crown unto him,” not merely in metaphor, but literally.  He exhibited himself, at the Shakespeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled Stratford-on-Avon, with a placard round his hat bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell.  In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world that at Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell.  Servile and impertinent, shallow and pedantic, a bigot and a sot, bloated with family pride, and eternally blustering about the dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt in the taverns of London, so curious to know everybody who was talked about, that, Tory and High Churchman as he was, he manoeuvred, we have been told, for an introduction to Tom Paine, so vain of the most childish distinctions, that when he had been to court he drove to the office where his book was printing without changing his clothes, and summoned all the printer’s devils to admire his new ruffles and sword; such was this man, and such he was content and proud to be.  Everything which another man would have hidden, everything the publication of which would have made another man hang himself, was matter of gay and clamorous exultation to his weak and diseased mind.  What silly things he said, what bitter retorts he provoked, how at one place he was troubled with evil presentiments which came to nothing, how at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the prayerbook and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him, how he went to see men hanged and came away maudlin, how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his babies because she was not scared at Johnson’s ugly face, how he was frightened out of his wits at sea, and how the sailors quieted him as they would have quieted a child, how tipsy he was at Lady Cork’s one evening and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies, how impertinent he was to the Duchess of Argyle and with what stately contempt she put down his impertinence, how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent obtrusiveness, how his father and the very wife of his bosom laughed