We cannot speak more favourably of the manner in which the notes are written, than of the matter of which they consist. We find in every page words used in wrong senses, and constructions which violate the plainest rules of grammar. We have the low vulgarism of "mutual friend," for "common friend." We have "fallacy" used as synonymous with 'falsehood," or "misstatement." We have many such inextricable labyrinths of pronouns as that which follows: "Lord Erskine was fond of this anecdote; he told it to the editor the first time that he had the honour of being in his company." Lastly, we have a plentiful supply of sentences resembling those which we subjoin. "Markland, who, with Jartin and Thirlby, Johnson calls three contemporaries of great eminence." "Warburton himself did not feel, as Mr. Boswell was disposed to think he did, kindly or gratefully of Johnson?" "It was him that Horace Walpole called a man who never made a bad figure but as an au thor." We must add that the printer has done his best to fill both the text and notes with all sorts of blunders; and he and the

editor have between them made the book so bad, that we do not well see how it could have been worse.

crease would have been discerrible.
whole would appear one and indivisible,
"Ut per læve severos
Effundat junctura ungues."

The

This is not the case with Mr. Croker's in sertions. They are not chosen as Boswell would have chosen them. They are not introduced as Boswell would have introduced them. They differ from the quotations scattered through the original Life of Johnson, as a withered bough stuck in the ground differs from a tree skilfully transplanted, with all its life about it.

When we turn from the commentary of Mr. Croker to the work of our old friend Boswell, we find it not only worse printed than in any other edition with which we are acquainted, but mangled in the most wanton manner. Much that Boswell inserted in his narrative is, without the shadow of a reason, degraded to the appendix. The editor has also taken upon himself to alter or omit passages which he considers as indecorous. This prudery is quite unintelligible to us. There is nothing immoral in Boswell's book-nothing which tends to inflame the passions. He sometimes uses plain words. But if this be a taint which requires expurgation, it would be desirable to begin by expurgating the morning and evening lessons. Mr. Croker has performed the delicate office which he has undertaken in the most capricious manner. A strong, old-fashioned, English word, familiar to all who read their Bibles, is exchanged for a softer synonyme in some passages, and suffered to stand unaltered in others. In one place, a faint allusion made by Johnson to an indelicate subject-an allusion so faint that, till Mr. Croker's note pointed it out to us, we had never noticed it, and of which we are quite sure that the meaning would never be discovered by any of those for whose sake books are expurgated-is alto- The course which Mr. Croker ought to have gether omitted. In another place, a coarse taken is quite clear. He should have reprinted and stupid jest of Doctor Taylor, on the same Boswell's narrative precisely as Boswell wrote subject, expressed in the broadest language-it; and in the notes or the appendix he should almost the only passage, as far as we remember, in all Boswell's book, which we should have been inclined to leave out-is suffered to remain.

We complain, however, much more of the additions than of the omissions. We have half of Mrs. Thrale's book, scraps of Mr. Tyers, scraps of Mr. Murphy, scraps of Mr. Cradock, long prosings of Sir John Hawkins, and connecting observations by Mr. Croker himself, inserted into the midst of Boswell's text. To this practice we most decidedly object. An editor might as well publish Thucydides with extracts from Diodorus interspersed, or incorporate the Lives of Suetonius with the History and Annals of Tacitus. Mr. Croker tells us, indeed, that he has done only what Boswell wished to do, and was prevented from doing by the law of copyright. We doubt this greatly. Boswell has studiously abstained from availing himself of the information contained in the works of his rivals, on many occasions on which he might have done so without subjecting himself to the charge of piracy. Mr. Croker has himself, on one occasion, remarked very justly that Boswell was very reluctant to owe any obligations to Hawkins. But be this as it may, if Boswell had quoted from Sir John and from Mrs. Thrale, he would| have been guided by his own taste and judgment in selecting his quotations. On what he quoted, he would have commented with perfect freedom, and the borrowed passages, so selected, and accompanied by such comments, would have become original. They would have dovetailed into the work: no hitch, no

Not only do these anecdotes disfigure Boswell's book; they are themselves disfigured by being inserted in his book. The charm of Mrs. Thrale's little volume is utterly destroyed. The feminine quickness of observation, the feminine softness of heart, the colloquial incorrectness and vivacity of style, the little amus ing airs of a half-learned lady, the delightful garrulity, the "dear Doctor Johnson," the "it was so comical," all disappear in Mr. Croker's quotations. The lady ceases to speak in the first person; and her anecdotes, in the process of transfusion, become as flat as champagne in decanters, or Herodotus in Beloe's version. Sir John Hawkins, it is true, loses nothing; and for the best of reasons. Sir John had nothing to lose.

have placed any anecdotes which he might have thought it advisable to quote from other writers. This would have been a much more convenient course for the reader, who has now constantly to keep his eye on the margin in order to see whether he is perusing Boswell, Mrs. Thrale, Murphy, Hawkins, Tyers, Cradock, or Mr. Croker. We greatly doubt whether even the Tour to the Hebrides ought to have been inserted in the midst of the Life. There is one marked distinction between the two works. Most of the Tour was seen by Johnson in manuscript. It does not appear that he ever saw any part of the Life.

We love, we own, to read the great productions of the human mind as they were written. We have this feeling even about scientific treatises; though we know that the sciences are always in a state of progression, and tha the alterations made by a modern editor in an old book on any branch of natural or political philosophy are likely to be improvements. Many errors have been detected by writers of this generation in the speculations of Adam Smith. A short cut has been made to much knowledge, at which Sir Isaac Newton arrived through arduous and circuitous paths. Yet we still look with peculiar veneration on the Wealth of Nations and on the Principia, and should regret to see either of those great works garbled even by the ablest hands. But in works which owe much of their interest to the character and situation of the writers, the case is infinitely stronger. What man of taste and feeling can endure harmonies, rifacimentos abridgments, expurgated editions?

Who ever

read: a stage-copy of a play, when he can procure the original? Who ever cut open Mrs. Siddons's Milton? Who ever got through ten pages of Mr. Gilpin's translation of John Bunyan's Pilgrim into modern English? Who would lose, in the confusion of a diatesseron, the peculiar charm which belongs to the narrative of the disciple whom Jesus loved? The feeling of a reader who has become intimate with any great original work, is that which Adam expressed towards his bride :

"Should God create another Eve, and I Another rib afford, yet loss of thee Would never from my heart."

No substitute, however exquisitely formed, will fill the void left by the original. The second beauty may be equal or superior to the first; but still it is not she.

intellect. Johnson described him as a fellow who had missed his only chance of immortality, by not having been alive when the Duuciad was written. Beauclerk used his name as a proverbial expression for a bore. He was the laughing-stock of the whole of that brilliant society which has owed to him the greater part of its fame. He was always laying himself at the feet of some eminent man, and begging to be spit upon and trampled upon. He was always earning some ridiculous nickname, and then "binding it as a crown unto him," -not merely in metaphor, but literally. He exhibited himself at the Shakspeare Jubilee, to all the crowd which filled Stafford-on-Avon, with a placard around his hat bearing the inscription of Corsica Boswell. In his Tour, he proclaimed to all the world, that at Edinburgh he was known by the appellation of Paoli Boswell. Servile and impertinent-shallow and

The reasons which Mr. Croker has given for incorporating passages from Sir John Hawkins and Mrs. Thrale with the narrative | pedantic-a bigot and a sot-bloated with faof Boswell, would vindicate the adulteration mily pride, and eternally blustering about the of half the classical works in the language. dignity of a born gentleman, yet stooping to be If Pepys's Diary and Mrs. Hutchinson's Me- a talebearer, an eavesdropper, a common butt moirs had been published a hundred years ago, in the taverns of London-so curious to know no human being can doubt that Mr. Hume everybody who was talked about, that, Tory and would have made great use of those books in High Churchman as he was, he manœuvred, his History of England. But would it, on that we have been told, for an introduction to account, be judicious in a writer of our times Tom Paine-so vain of the most childish disto publish an edition of Hume's History of tinctions, that, when he had been to court, he England, in which large additions from Pepys drove to the office where his book was being and Mrs. Hutchinson should be incorporated printed without changing his clothes, and sumwith the original text? Surely not. Hume's moned all the printer's devils to admire his history, be its faults what they may, is now new ruffles and sword;-such was this man: one great entire work-the production of one and such he was content and proud to be. vigorous mind, working on such materials Every thing which another man would have as were within its reach. Additions made by hidden-every thing, the publication of which another hand may supply a particular defi- would have made another man hang himself, ciency, but would grievously injure the gene- was matter of gay and clamorous exultation ral effect. With Boswell's book the case is to his weak and diseased mind. What silly stronger. There is scarcely, in the whole things he said—what bitter retorts he provoked compass of literature, a book which bears in--how at one place he was troubled with evil terpolation so ill. We know no production of the human mind which has so much of what may be called the race, so much of the peculiar flavour of the soil from which it sprang. The work could never have been written, if the writer had not been precisely what he was. His character is displayed in every page, and this display of character gives a delightful interest to many passages which

have no other interest.

The life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakspeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers. He has no second. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly, that it is not worth vhile to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.

We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phenomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived; and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account, or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest

presentiments which came to nothing-how at another place, on waking from a drunken doze, he read the Prayer-book, and took a hair of the dog that had bitten him-how he went to see men hanged, and came away maudlin-how he added five hundred pounds to the fortune of one of his babies, because she was not frightened at Johnson's ugly face-how he was frightened out of his wits at sea-and how the sailors quieted him as they would have quieted a child-how tipsy he was at Lady Cork's one evening, and how much his merriment annoyed the ladies-how impertinent he was to the Duchess of Argyle, and with what stately contempt she put down his impertinence-how Colonel Macleod sneered to his face at his impudent ob trusiveness-how his father and the very wife of his bosom laughed and fretted at his fooleries

all these things he proclaimed to all the world, as if they had been subjects for pride and ostentatious rejoicing. All the caprices of his tem per, all the illusions of his vanity, all the hypo chondriac whimsies, all his castles in the air, he displayed with a cool self-complacency, perfect unconsciousness that he was making a fool of himself, to which it is impossible to find a parallel in the whole history of mankind. He has used many people ill, but assu redly he has used nobody so ill as himsel

of Fluellen. Of all confessors, Boswell is the most candid. Other men who have pretended to lay open their own hearts-Rousseau, for example, and Lord Byron-have evidently written with a constant view to effect, and are to be then most distrusted when they seem to be most sincere. There is scarcely any man who would not rather accuse himself of great crimes and of dark and tempestuous passions, than proclaim all his little vanities, and all his wild fancies. It would be easier to find a person who would avow actions like those of Cæsar Borgia or Danton, than one who would publish a day-dream like those of Alnaschar and Malvolio. Those weaknesses which most men keep covered up in the most secret places of the mind, not to be disclosed to the eye of friendship or of love, were precisely the weaknesses which Boswell paraded before all the world. He was perfectly frank, because the weakness of his understanding and the tumult of his spirit prevented him from knowing when he made himself ridicu lous. His book resembles nothing so much as the conversation of the inmates of the Palace of Truth.

That such a man should have written one of the best books in the world, is strange enough. But this is not all. Many persons who have conducted themselves foolishly in active life, and whose conversation has indicated no superior powers of mind, have written valuable books. Goldsmith was very just ly described by one of his contemporaries as an inspired idiot, and by another as a being, "Who wrote like an angel, and talked like poor Poll." La Fontaine was in society a mere simpleton. His blunders would not come in amiss among the stories of Hierocles. But these men attained literary eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest and the torment of those among whom he lived-without the officiousness, the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was a slave, proud of his servitude; a Paul Pry, convinced that his own curiosity and garrulity were virtues; an unsafe companion, who never scru- His fame is great, and it will, we have no Fled to repay the most liberal hospitality by doubt, be lasting; but it is fame of a peculiar t basest violation of confidence; a man kind, and indeed marvellously resembles infawithout delicacy, without shame, without sense my. We remember no other case in which the enough to know when he was hurting the feel-world has made so great a distinction between ings of others, or when he was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has, in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.

Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers, he had absolutely none. There is not, in all his books, a single remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society, which is not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary gentility, on the slave trade, and on the entailing of landed estates, may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical, would be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to argument or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and virtue, would scarcely of themselves have sufficed to make him conspicuous; but, as he was a dunce, a parasite, and a coxcomb, they have made him immortal.

a book and its author. In general, the book and the author are considered as one. To admire the book is to admire the author. The case of Boswell is an exception, we think the only exception, to this rule. His work is universally allowed to be interesting, instructive, eminently original; yet it has brought him nothing but contempt. All the world reads it, all the world delights in it; yet we do not remember ever to have read or even to have heard any expression of respect and admiration for the man to whom we owe so much instruction and amusement. While edition after edition of his book was coming forth, his son, as Mr. Croker tells us, was ashamed of it, and hated to hear it mentioned. This feeling was natural and reasonable. Sir Alexander saw, that in proportion to the celebrity of the work was the degradation of the author. The very editors of this unfortunate gentleman's books have forgotten their allegiance, and, like those Puritan casuists who took arms by the authority of the king against his person, have attacked the writer while doing homage to the writings. Mr. Cro ker, for example, has published two thousand five hundred notes on the Life of Johnson, and yet scarcely ever mentions the biographer, whose performance he has taken such pains to illustrate, without some expression of contempt.

An ill-natured man Boswell certainly was not. Yet the malignity of the most malignan: satirist could scarcely cut deeper than his Those parts of his book which, considered thoughtless loquacity. Having himself ne abstractedly, are most utterly worthless, are sensibility to derision and contempt, he took it delightful when we read them as illustrations for granted that all others were equally callous of the character of the writer. Bad in them- He was not ashamed to exhibit himself to the selves, they are good dramatically, like the whole world as a common spy, a common tatonsense of Justice Shallow, the clipped Eng-tler, a humble companion without the excuse ch of Dr. Caius, or the misplaced consonants of poverty, to tell a hundred stories of his own

pertness and folly, and of the insults which his pertness and folly brought upon him. It was natural that he should show little discretion in cases in which the feelings or the honour of others might be concerned. No man, surely, ever published such stories respecting persons whom he professed to love and revere. He would infallibly have made his hero as contemptible as he has made himself, had not this hero really possessed some moral and intellectual qualities of a very high order. The best proof that Johnson was really an extraordinary man, is, that his character, instead of being degraded, has, on the whole, been decidedly raised by a work in which all his vices and weaknesses are exposed more unsparingly than they ever were exposed by Churchill or by Kenrick.

Johnson came up to London precisely at the time when the condition of a man of letters was most miserable and degraded. It was a dark night between two sunny days. The age of Mæcenases had passed away. The age of general curiosity and intelligence had not ar rived. The number of readers is at present so great, that a popular author may subsist in comfort and opulence on the profits of his works. In the reigns of William the Third, of Anne, and of George the First, even such men as Congreve and Addison would scarcely have been able to live like gentlemen by the mere sale of their writings. But the deficiency of the natural demand for literature was, at the close of the seventeenth and at the beginning of the eighteenth century, more than made up by artificial encouragement, by a vast system Johnson grown old, Johnson in the fulness of bounties and premiums. There was, perof his fame and in the enjoyment of a compe-haps, never a time at which the rewards of tent fortune, is better known to us than any literary merit were so splendid-at which men other man in history. Every thing about him, who could write well found such easy admithis coat, his wig, his figure, his face, his scro-tance into the most distinguished society and fula, his St. Vitus's dance, his rolling walk, his to the highest honours of the state. The chiefs blinking eye, the outward signs which too of both the great parties into which the kingclearly marked his approbation of his dinner, dom was divided patronised literature with his insatiable appetite for fish-sauce and veal-emulous munificence. Congreve, when he had pie with plums, his inextinguishable thirst for tea, his trick of touching the posts as he walked, his mysterious practice of treasuring up scraps of orange-peel, his morning slumbers, his midnight disputations, his contortions, his mutterings, his gruntings, his puffings, his vigorous, acute, and ready eloquence, his sarcastic wit, his vehemence, his insolence, his fits of tempestuous rage, his queer inmates, old Mr. Levett and blind Mrs. Williams, the cat Hedge and the negro Frank-all are as familiar to us as the objects by which we have been surrounded from childhood. But we have no minute information respecting those years of Johnson's life during which his character and his manners became immutably fixed. We know him not as he was known to the men of his own generation, but as he was known to men whose father he might have been. That celebrated club of which he was the most distinguished member contained few persons who could remember a time when his fame was not fully established and his habits completely formed. He had made himself a name in literature while Reynolds and the Wartons were still boys. He was about twenty years older than Burke, Goldsmith, and Gerard Hamilton; about thirty years older than Gibbon, Beauclerk, and Langton; and about forty years older than Lord Stowell, Sir William Jones, and Windham. Boswell and Mrs. Thrale, the two writers from whom we derive most of our knowledge respecting him, never saw him till long after he was fifty years old, till most of his great works had become classical, and till the pension bestowed on him by Lord Bute had placed him above poverty. Of those eminent men who were his most intimate associates towards the close of his life, the only one, as far as we remember, who knew him during the first ten or twelve years of his residence in the capital, was David Garrick; and it does not appear that, during those years, David Garrick saw much of his fellow-townsman.

scarcely attained his majority, was rewarded for his first comedy with places which made him independent for life. Smith, though his Hippolytus and Phaedra failed, would have been consoled with £300 a year, but for his own folly. Rowe was not only poet-laureate, but land-surveyor of the customs in the port of London, clerk of the council to the Prince of Wales, and secretary of the Presentations to the Lord Chancellor. Hughes was secretary to the Commissions of the Peace. Ambrose Philips was judge of the Prerogative Court in Ireland. Locke was Commissioner of Appeals and of the Board of Trade. Newton was Master of the Mint. Stepney and Prior were employed in embassies of high dignity and importance. Gay, who commenced life as apprentice to a silk-mercer, became a secre tary of legation at five-and-twenty. It was to a poem on the Death of Charles II., and to the City and Country Mouse, that Montague owed his introduction into public life, his earldom, his garter, and his auditorship of the Exche quer. Swift, but for the unconquerable preju dice of the queen, would have been a bishop. Oxford, with his white staff in his hand, passed through the crowd of his suitors to welcome Parnell, when that ingenious writer deserted the Whigs. Steele was a commissioner of stamps and a member of Parliament. Arthur Mainwaring was a commissioner of the cus toms and auditor of the imprest. Tickell was secretary to the Lords Justices of Ireland. Addison was secretary of state.

This liberal patronage was brought into fashion, as it seems, by the magnificent Dorset, who alone, of all the noble versifiers in the court of Charles the Second, possessed talents for composition which would have made him eminent without the aid of a coronet. Monta gue owed his elevation to the favour of Dorset, and imitated through the whole course of his life the liberality to which he was himself so greatly indebted. The Tory leaders, Harley