Macaulay says, “If Boswell had not been a great fool he never would have been a great writer.”  This is one of those paradoxical statements to which Macaulay likes to give a glittering plausibility.  It is true that Boswell wrote a great book, and it is also true that in some regards he was what we are accustomed to designate as a fool; but to connect the two as cause and effect is like saying that a man was a great athlete because he was lame, or that Lord Byron had a beautiful face because he had a club-foot, or that Demosthenes was a great orator because he stammered.  Men have been made by their foibles, but in those cases weakness in some directions has been more than compensated for by strength in others.  Boswell lacked some of the great literary powers, but he possessed others, and those that he did possess happened to be precisely the ones necessary to the writer of the life of Samuel Johnson.  Boswell had no imagination, no moral elevation, no decided wit or power of phrase, no deep insight, no invention.  But he had one power which lies behind all great realistic literary work; and that is, observation.  Johnson furnished the power of phrase, in which he was as eminent as any Englishman between Shakespeare and Charles Lamb.  The higher powers are not needed in a transcript of fact.  Boswell possessed too an eye for the externals which indicate character, and—­a quality rare in the eighteenth century—­absolute accuracy.  Sir Joshua Reynolds said, “Every word of the ‘Life’ might be depended on as if it were given on oath.”

It was this habit of painstaking accuracy, rather than good taste, which led him to avoid the vice of rhetorical amplification.  It also prevented him from missing the point of a joke of which he was unconscious.  As a rule, his ‘Johnsoniana’ are better than those of Sir John Hawkins or Mrs. Piozzi, because they are more literal.  In one or two instances an embellishment which improved a story was rejected by him because it was not true.  These powers—­observation, scrupulous accuracy and industry, and enthusiastic admiration of his hero—­were all that he needed for the production of a great book; for Dr. Johnson was so unaffected, so outspoken, and so entertaining a man, and every sentence he uttered was so characteristic, that realism was a far better method for his biographer than analysis.  Perhaps it is always better when the subject is strongly marked.  That Dr. Johnson was a good subject is so evident that the mere statement is sufficient.  Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi’s and even Sir John Hawkins’s books are entertaining simply because they are about him.