We can pass the long green ranks of the Waverley Novels and Lockhart’s “Life” which flanks them.  Here is heavier metal in the four big grey volumes beyond.  They are an old-fashioned large-print edition of Boswell’s “Life of Johnson.”  I emphasize the large print, for that is the weak point of most of the cheap editions of English Classics which come now into the market.  With subjects which are in the least archaic or abstruse you need good clear type to help you on your way.  The other is good neither for your eyes nor for your temper.  Better pay a little more and have a book that is made for use.

That book interests me—­fascinates me—­and yet I wish I could join heartily in that chorus of praise which the kind-hearted old bully has enjoyed.  It is difficult to follow his own advice and to “clear one’s mind of cant” upon the subject, for when you have been accustomed to look at him through the sympathetic glasses of Macaulay or of Boswell, it is hard to take them off, to rub one’s eyes, and to have a good honest stare on one’s own account at the man’s actual words, deeds, and limitations.  If you try it you are left with the oddest mixture of impressions.  How could one express it save that this is John Bull taken to literature—­the exaggerated John Bull of the caricaturists—­with every quality, good or evil, at its highest?  Here are the rough crust over a kindly heart, the explosive temper, the arrogance, the insular narrowness, the want of sympathy and insight, the rudeness of perception, the positiveness, the overbearing bluster, the strong deep-seated religious principle, and every other characteristic of the cruder, rougher John Bull who was the great grandfather of the present good-natured Johnnie.

If Boswell had not lived I wonder how much we should hear now of his huge friend?  With Scotch persistence he has succeeded in inoculating the whole world with his hero worship.  It was most natural that he should himself admire him.  The relations between the two men were delightful and reflect all credit upon each.  But they are not a safe basis from which any third person could argue.  When they met, Boswell was in his twenty-third and Johnson in his fifty-fourth year.  The one was a keen young Scot with a mind which was reverent and impressionable.  The other was a figure from a past generation with his fame already made.  From the moment of meeting the one was bound to exercise an absolute ascendency over the other which made unbiassed criticism far more difficult than it would be between ordinary father and son.  Up to the end this was the unbroken relation between them.