his bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries—­all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicings.  All the caprices of his temper, all the illusions of his vanity, all his hypochondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, a perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind.  He has used many people ill; but assuredly he has used nobody so ill as himself.

That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world is strange enough.  But this is not all.  Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of mind, have left us valuable works.  Goldsmith was very justly described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, and by another as a being

    “Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll.”

La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton.  His blunders would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles.  But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses.  Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses.  If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer.  Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book.  He was a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others, or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.

Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers Boswell had absolutely none.  There is not in all his books a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society which is not either commonplace or absurd.  His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples.  To say that these passages are sophistical would be to pay them an extravagant compliment.  They have no pretence to argument, or even to meaning.  He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course of conversation.  Of those observations we do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen.  He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling.  Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him.  He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory.  These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but, because he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal.