James Boswell, 1740-1795:  he was the son of a Scottish judge called Lord Auchinleck, from his estate.  He studied law, and travelled, publishing, on his return, Journal of a Tour in Corsica.  He appears to us a simple-hearted and amiable man, inquisitive, and exact in details.  He became acquainted with Dr. Johnson in 1763, and conceived an immense admiration for him.  In numerous visits to London, and in their tour to the Hebrides together, he noted Johnson’s speech and actions, and, in 1791, published his life, which has already been characterized as the greatest biography ever written.  Its value is manifold; not only is it a faithful portrait of the great writer, but, in the detailed record of his life, we have the wit, dogmatism, and learning of his hero, as expressing and illustrating the history of the age, quite as fully as the published works of Johnson.  In return for this most valuable contribution to history and literature, the critics, one and all, have taxed their ingenuity to find strong words of ridicule and contempt for Boswell, and have done him great injustice.  Because he bowed before the genius of Johnson, he was not a toady, nor a fool; at the worst, he was a fanatic, and a not always wise champion.  Johnson was his king, and his loyalty was unqualified.

Horace Walpole, the Right Honorable, and afterwards Earl of Orford, 1717-1797:  he was a wit, a satirist, and a most accomplished writer, who, notwithstanding, affected to despise literary fame.  His paternity was doubted; but he enjoyed wealth and honors, and, by the possession of three sinecures, he lived a life of elegant leisure.  He transformed a small house on the bank of the Thames, at Twickenham, into a miniature castle, called Strawberry Hill, which he filled with curiosities.  He held a very versatile pen, and wrote much on many subjects.  Among his desultory works are:  Anecdotes of Painting in England, and AEdes Walpoliana, a description of the pictures at Houghton Hall, the seat of Sir Robert Walpole.  He also ranks among the novelists, as the author of The Castle of Otranto, in which he deviates from the path of preceding writers of fiction—­a sort of individual reaction from their portraitures of existing society to the marvellous and sensational.  This work has been variously criticized; by some it has been considered a great flight of the imagination, but by most it is regarded as unnatural and full of “pasteboard machinery.”  He had immediate followers in this vein, among whom are Mrs. Aphra Behn, in her Old English Baron; and Ann Radcliffe, in The Romance of the Forest, and The Mysteries of Udolpho.  Walpole also wrote a work entitled Historic Doubts on the Life and Reign of Richard III.  But his great value as a writer is to be found in his Memoirs and varied Correspondence, in which he presents photographs of the society in which he lives.  Scott calls him “the best letter-writer in the