[Footnote 4: _Tour to the Hebrides_, p. 434 (Dr. Hill's edition).] [Footnote 5: _Tour to the Hebrides_, Appendix 1.] [Footnote 6: _Life of Johnson_, iii, 270.] [Footnote 7: _Life of Johnson_, ii, 372.] [Footnote 8: _Life of Johnson_, i, 26.] [Footnote 9: _Ib._, i, 421.] [Footnote 10: _Boswelliana_, Grampian Club, 1874. Preface.] [Footnote 11: Boswell on one occasion told a lady that her joke should be included in _Boswelliana_.] [Footnote 12: _Life of Johnson_, iv, 83.] [Footnote 13: _Ib._, iii, 308.] [Footnote 14: p. xiii.] CHAPTER XII The method we have been examining has revealed, in a sense, a second aspect of Boswell as the biographer, the natural complement of that scientific spirit which inspired the acute observation, the delicate experiments, the methodical accuracy; for he brought to the work of recording not merely the faculty for stating truthfully what he had seen, but the power of expressing his feelings; and it was particularly this feeling--an interest at the same time full-blooded, comprehensive and minute--that insisted upon expression. The emotion which compels a man to bind himself to an ideal, and, having determined that something must be done under certain conditions, compels the doing of it without capitulation, is one which enters into many kinds of work and is to be found no doubt very often among scientists; but it is in a peculiar degree the possession of the artist. To him indeed it seems to be essential; for his value depends certainly not more on the quality of what he has to express than on the completeness with which he expresses it. And so perhaps we ought to connect the consistency, the truth, the faith of Boswell, and his disregard for obstacles, with his artistic rather than with his scientific qualities; so we ought to interpret Boswell's love of his labour and his conviction that it was good, and so to understand all the trouble that it cost to his mind and to the more sensitive part of him. The refusal to depart from his ideal which he made to Hannah More ('I would not cut off his claws, nor make my tiger a cat, to please anybody'),[1] and again to Bishop Percy when he declined, for the sake of 'authenticity,' to suppress the bishop's name,[2] is an indication of the need he had to express himself as an artist.[3] But how was it that he came so to express himself? And what is it that he succeeded in expressing?