in twopenny cook-shops.  Manners and modes of thought had greatly changed since the century before.  Macbeth, in silk stockings and scarlet coat, slew King Duncan, and the pit admired the wild force occasionally exhibited by the barbarian Shakspeare.  In those days the Muse wore patches, and sat in a sumptuous boudoir, and her worshippers surrounded her in high-heeled shoes, ruffles, and powdered wigs.  When the poets wished to paint nature, they described Chloe sitting on a green bank watching her sheep, or sighing when Strephon confessed his flame.  And yet, with all this apparent shallowness, the age was earnest enough in its way.  It was a good hater.  It was filled with relentless literary feuds.  Just recall the lawless state of things on the Scottish Border in the olden time,—­the cattle-lifting, the house-burning, the midnight murders, the powerful marauders, who, safe in numerous retainers and moated keep, bade defiance to law; recall this state of things, and imagine the quarrels and raids literary, the weapons satire and wit, and you have a good idea of the darker aspect of the time.  There were literary reavers, who laid desolate at a foray a whole generation of wits.  There were literary duels, fought out in grim hate to the very death.  It was dangerous to interfere in the literary melee.  Every now and then a fine gentleman was run through with a jest, or a foolish Maecenas stabbed to the heart with an epigram, and his foolishness settled for ever.

As a matter of course, on this special shelf of books will be found Boswell’s “Life of Johnson”—­a work in our literature unique, priceless.  That altogether unvenerable yet profoundly venerating Scottish gentleman,—­that queerest mixture of qualities, of force and weakness, blindness and insight, vanity and solid worth,—­has written the finest book of its kind which our nation possesses.  It is quite impossible to over-state its worth.  You lift it, and immediately the intervening years disappear, and you are in the presence of the Doctor.  You are made free of the last century, as you are free of the present.  You double your existence.  The book is a letter of introduction to a whole knot of departed English worthies.  In virtue of Boswell’s labours, we know Johnson—­the central man of his time—­better than Burke did, or Reynolds,—­far better even than Boswell did.  We know how he expressed himself, in what grooves his thoughts ran, how he ate, drank, and slept.  Boswell’s unconscious art is wonderful, and so is the result attained.  This book has arrested, as never book did before, time and decay.  Bozzy is really a wizard:  he makes the sun stand still.  Till his work is done, the future stands respectfully aloof.  Out of ever-shifting time he has made fixed and permanent certain years, and in these Johnson talks and argues, while Burke listens, and Reynolds takes snuff, and Goldsmith, with hollowed hand, whispers a sly remark to his neighbour.  There have they