It was also due in some degree to the influence of Johnson that Boswell himself was so much a moralist: it was something of the same influence, it was in part the honest ruggedness which exalted that morality, by denuding it of excessive and affected sentiment, that enabled Boswell to be a moralist without being (in the Johnsonian phraseology) a canting moralist. Boswell, indeed, became a moralist because he wanted to be respectable; but he was not entirely respectable because he succeeded in being a moralist. A man who is a moralist to the extent that Boswell and Johnson were moralists may be too respectable to be an honest biographer. It does not become the stainless respectability of the moralist to bring to light the blemishes of a man in a book; in conversation that may be done; there is no harm in a few people knowing; but it would be dangerous and improper to reveal them in print to the public gaze; and so it was not respectable in Boswell to say anything about the sexual temptations of Johnson, and Miss Burney and Hannah More would no doubt be shocked. But the love of truth which Johnson nourished was fundamental in Boswell, and it was irrepressible; we know Johnson, chiefly for this reason, better than any other man whose life has been recorded. It is remarkable for other reasons besides this--that he was a moralist--that Boswell produced an impartial biography. He was by no means free from personal animosities. Sir John Hawkins had written the official life at the request of Johnson's literary executors, and Boswell, naturally, was jealous of him on this account. A matter for greater irritation was that Boswell himself had been almost entirely ignored,[9] the one slighting mention of his name being worse than no mention of his connection with Johnson. And Mrs. Thrale also, who had published her 'Anecdotes,' had alluded to Boswell only in one contemptuous passage. Boswell therefore had the deliberate intention of showing up the faults of these two rivals; a long paragraph is introduced as early as possible, explaining fully why the 'Life' by Sir John Hawkins is a bad book, and ending thus: There is throughout the whole of it a dark uncharitable cast, by which the most unfavourable construction is put upon almost every circumstance in the character and conduct of my illustrious friend; who, I trust, will, by a true and fair delineation, be vindicated both from the injurious misrepresentations of this author, and from the slighter aspersions of a lady who once lived in great intimacy with him.[10] The same lady was alluded to afterwards in a note of peculiar malice: I am obliged in so many instances to notice Mrs. Piozzi's incorrectness of relation, that I gladly seize this opportunity of acknowledging that, however often, she is not always inaccurate.