[First printed in Fraser's Magazine, No. 28 (May 1832), as a review of the Book entitled, The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.; including a Tour to the Hebrides: By James Boswell, Esq.A New Edition, with numerous Additions and Notes; By John Wilson Croker, LL.D., F.R.S. 5 vols. London, 1831.Reprinted here without alteration.] t સાઇ SAMUEL JOHNSON. Æsop's Fly, sitting on the axle of the chariot, has been much laughed at for exclaiming: What a dust I do raise! Yet which of us, in his way, has not sometimes been guilty of the like? Nay, so foolish are men, they often, standing at ease and as spectators on the highway, will volunteer to exclaim of the Fly (not being tempted to it, as he was) exactly to the same purport: What a dust thou dost raise! Smallest of mortals, when mounted aloft by circumstances, come to seem great; smallest of phenomena connected with them are treated as important, and must be sedulously scanned, and commented upon with loud emphasis. That Mr. Croker should undertake to edit Boswell's Life of Johnson, was a praiseworthy but no miraculous procedure: neither could the accomplishment of such undertaking be, in an epoch like ours, anywise regarded as an event in Universal History; the right or the wrong accomplishment thereof was, in very truth, one of the most B |