temporaries as well as from his own public writings and private letters. They serve, too, a third purpose. Johnson apparently in boyhood was little more than a bookworm. It was by sheer will power and with manly conviction that he forced himself to grapple with the hard facts of his experience and get their intrinsic worth without evasion and with as little self-delusion as can perhaps be hoped for by fallible man. When he had pretty much found himself in his struggle, fortune sent him a number of new friends and acquaintances whose sheltered lives and superficial habits of thinking had given them an easy, if not glib, optimism, some vanity over their own liberalism, and a somewhat callous complacency over what they thought their sympathy with the rights of man. They dined him, flattered him, cross-questioned him, and aired their views, somewhat tentatively, before him. He was pleased, diverted, and at the same time frequently incensed beyond endurance. These companions and annoyers I have tried to describe faithfully, though briefly, in the notes. None of the easy generalizations with which they were satisfied contented Johnson. If he seems often to contradict himself in contradicting them, it is well to bear in mind that to deny one superficial proposition is not necessarily to accept its equally glib opposite.

No one can concern himself long with Johnson without recognizing one's debt to the labors of Birkbeck Hill, the most delightful and illuminating of annotators. This volume, I hope, will turn some readers to the thirteen volumes in which he has so fully and sympathetically edited the Life, the Letters, the Lives of the Poets, and what he has well called Johnsonian Miscellanies. For, after all, the most flattering as well as the best use that one can make of an abridgment is to use it not as substitute for the original but as an introduction to it.

HERBERT VAUGHAN ABBOTT

Northampton, Massachusetts,

November 15, 1923.

A BRIEF BIBLIOGRAPHY

To list all the works which have been consulted in the preparation of this volume would require more space than is either possible or desirable. I have, therefore, noted only those books on which a Johnsonian recruit might wisely make a beginning. They will suggest many others, and those still others; and so will open the door for indefinite research:

BOSWELL, JAMES: An Account of Corsica, the Journal of a Tour to That Island, and Memoirs of Pascal Paoli. 1 vol. BOSWELL, JAMES: Letters Addressed to the Rev. W. J. Temple. 1 vol.

BOSWELL, JAMES:

Life of Johnson (including Boswell's Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides), ed. by George Birkbeck Hill. 6 vols. D'ARBLAY, FANNY BURNEY, MME.: Diary and Letters, ed. by her niece, Charlotte Barrett, with Preface and Notes by Austin Dobson. 6 vols.

JOHNSON, SAMUEL: Lives of the Poets, ed. by George Birkbeck Hill. 3 vols.

JOHNSON, SAMUEL: Letters, ed. by George Birkbeck Hill. 2 vols. JOHNSON, SAMUEL: [In his works] Lives of Boerhaave, Sir Thomas Browne, Edward Cave, Sir Francis Drake, the King of Prussia; Plan of the English Dictionary, Preface to the English Dictionary, Preface to Shakespeare; Prologue on the Opening of the Drury Lane Theater; London; the Vanity of Human Wishes; Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland; Review of a Free Beginning into the Nature and Origin of Evil; The Rambler..

JOHNSONIAN MISCELLANIES: ed. by George Birkbeck Hill. 2 vols. PIOZZI, HESTER LYNCH SALUSBURY, MRS.: Autobiography, Letters, and Literary Remains, ed. by A. Hayward. 1 vol. RALEIGH, SIR WALTER ALEXANDER: Six Essays on Johnson. Oxford. 1910. 1 vol.

TINKER, CHAUNCEY BREWSTER: Young Boswell. 1922. The Atlantic Monthly Press. 1 vol.

INTRODUCTION

I

JAMES BOSWELL

Milton's famous remark that "a good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit" seems, of course, a violent exaggeration when we think of the many excellent books of information that come out every year, serve their purpose, and then give way to later knowledge. But perhaps it tells us more clearly than any other phrase what it is which makes us set some books apart from these and treasure them as pure literature, as preserving for posterity the "seasoned life of man."

It is evidently of this personal element, this "lifeblood," that Goethe is thinking when he urges us "to seek out for what is internal and peculiar in a book which particularly interests us, and to weigh in what relation it stands to our own inner nature and how far by that vitality our own is excited and rendered faithful."

This search is preeminently the true, the ideal work of the critic and the biographer. Boswell, alas! was not the stuff of which fidelity is made, nor was he capable of a scrupulous weighing of his own inner nature, but in other respects he continually tried to do with living men, with Voltaire, with Rousseau, with Dr. Johnson, with Paoli, what Goethe would have us do with books. He was eager to get at what was "internal and peculiar in them."

Apart from this, though brisk and bustling enough to be always interesting, he was not so important as to be famous. The son and heir of a Scotch gentleman, Lord Auchinleck, with a great estate and six hundred tenants on his future domains, he could look forward, if he chose, to becoming, sooner or later, a country magnate of first importance in his neighborhood; where, with the help of a little imagination, he could play Scottish chieftain, but he was restive, he was eager for the capitals of Europe; for a little while he thought of being a soldier,

dropped the idea, made the Grand Tour, as far as Rome, studied law and later practiced it, ventured into the wilds of Corsica for a few months, advertised himself as the "Corsican Boswell," flirted outrageously, married a cousin, made a rather trying husband, a somewhat better father, was good to his tenants, wrote one entertaining book besides his life of Johnson, drank too hard, and died in 1795, at the age of fifty-five.

His only claim to distinction is that he was the most ardent and persistent of biographers. He would engage in any maneuver to gain a little more insight into the prejudices, the point of view, the passions of any man he accounted great. He poured out confidences in order to win confidences in return, was often adulatory, often impudent, made himself an object of advice, or a butt for wit. He was pleased with being "a man of feeling," as the phrase ran then, and would do anything to observe the feelings of others and record them in his notebooks.

II

JOHNSON AND BOSWELL IN CONTRAST

"And yet" . . . Dr. Johnson once made the remark-the reader will run across it somewhere in this volume-"a fallible being will fail somewhere." It is as true of biographers as of any other race of mortals, of Boswell, perhaps the greatest of them, as of any other biographer. An eager listener, a vivid reporter, he could pare down a conversation to what really counted and yet leave it lifelike, but he was never close enough, never resolute enough in his thinking to follow with complete understanding Dr. Johnson's way of reasoning. Emotions he could always understand far better than principles, he had nothing of Johnson's sturdiness of character, his own point of view toward life was altogether different-more different than he knew. Some of these differences it is worth our while to investigate a little further.

Today so many people believe that the human race is continually on the upward trend, is slowly but surely advancing toward perfection, that it is difficult to imagine a state of civilization when such a notion was so rare as not to be worth noting.