Dr. Johnson has been considered, and very properly considered, a great talker. Not the least of our reasons for reading the 'Life' is that we are interested to know what Johnson had to say; and we find there the expressed thoughts of Johnson upon a great number of subjects. That Boswell should have preserved so much--that, though the same topics may more than once be discussed, yet every conversation gives a distinct and separate impression, and each one is valuable--tells us not only that Boswell himself must have had a high order of intelligence to apprehend and preserve the point of Johnson's discourse upon so many occasions, but, what is important for our purpose at the moment, tells us (when we remember how little time altogether he spent with Johnson and that the time most fruitful in records, during the famous tour in the Hebrides, is not included in the 'Life') that he himself must have had some part in finding out the Doctor's opinion. For Johnson was not exactly what is called an expansive person; it was an effort to him to talk seriously, and it was usually necessary to engage him gradually in conversation before he talked his best. Boswell has told us, 'he very often sat quite silent for a long time.' He said of himself: 'Tom Tyers described me the best. He once said to me, "Sir, you are like a ghost. You never speak until you are spoken to."' It is remarkable that Boswell should have had so much to record. The explanation is that he made Johnson talk; he did it not by accident but quite deliberately; this is a substantial part of his whole biographical method. 'I also,' he says in the 'Tour to the Hebrides,' 'may be allowed to claim some merit in leading the conversation. I do not mean leading as in an orchestra, by playing the first fiddle; but leading as one does in examining a witness--starting topics and making him pursue them.' And he did not find this part of his task particularly easy: He appears to me like a great mill, into which a subject is thrown to be ground. It requires, indeed, fertile minds to furnish subjects for this mill--I regret when I see it unemployed; but sometimes I feel myself quite barren, and have nothing to throw in. On most occasions, however, Boswell's mind was sufficiently fertile, and it enabled him to say some very odd things; his ingenuity was exercised in asking Johnson the most absurd questions, and he did this very often in the hope of some good retort. 'If, Sir,' he once demanded irrelevantly, 'you were shut up in a castle and a new-born child with you, what would you do?' Johnson is said to have related that one question was, 'Pray, Sir, can you tell why an apple is round and a pear pointed?'[1] On one occasion Boswell, apparently without reference to anything which had previously been said, asked 'if he had ever been accustomed to wear a night-cap.' And such questions were apt to produce an amusing discussion.