'What do you mean, Sir? What do you take me for? Do you think I am so ignorant of the world as to imagine that I am to prescribe to a gentleman what company he is to have at his table?' An excuse must now be made which is certain to meet with sledge-hammer reasoning or piercing sarcasm, and it will then be safe to lead up to the disagreeable intelligence. 'I beg your pardon, Sir, for wishing to prevent you from meeting people whom you might not like. Perhaps he may have some of what he calls his patriotic friends with him.' _Johnson_: 'Well, Sir, what then? What care _I_ for his _patriotic friends_? Poh!' _Boswell_: 'I should not be surprised to find Jack Wilkes there.' The possibility may have been disconcerting, but retreat was now out of the question. _Johnson_: 'And if Jack Wilkes should be there, what is that to me, Sir? My dear friend, let me have no more of this. I am sorry to be angry with you, but really it is treating me strangely to talk to me as if I could not meet any company whatever, occasionally.' So the matter was settled. Boswell asks forgiveness and clinches the matter: 'Pray forgive me, Sir; I meant well. But you shall meet whoever comes.' 'Thus,' he tells the reader, with evident satisfaction, 'I secured him.' The man who could do this was clearly of importance to those who were interested, even though in a less degree than himself, in Dr. Johnson. We may suppose that the circle of Johnson's literary friends welcomed Boswell as much for his peculiar homage to the Doctor as for his own social talents. * * * * * We must now more nearly examine that friendship, which is as much the concern of our own age as it was of Boswell's. We have considered already what it was that caused these two men to be friends; but the meanest picture of Boswell must include some account of his behaviour towards Johnson; we must review the progress of their friendship and remark the more characteristic attitudes of the biographer. In the pages of the 'Life of Johnson' is recorded in detail, and almost without reserve, the story of the relations between these two friends. It is a story full of humour, telling of all the little peculiarities of a great man, of all the whims and foibles which we are accustomed to observe in old age and which we both like and laugh at; but it is the story also of a deep and anxious affection.