THERE is no word of vindication or appreciation to be added to Mr. Carlyle’s estimate of the character and merits of James Boswell. That judgment places him so high that the most fantastic dream of his own self-importance would have been fully realized, and yet there is no disguise of his follies or condonation of his vices. We understand at once the justice and the injustice of his contemporaries, and while we are amused at the thought of their astonishment could the future fame of the object of so much banter and rude criticism have been revealed to them, we doubt whether, had we been in their place, our misapprehension and depreciation would not have been still greater than theirs. It was the object of Boswell’s life to connect his own name with that of Dr. Johnson; the one is now identified with the other. He aspired to transmit to future time the more transitory and evanescent forms of Johnson’s genius; he has become the repository of all that is most significant and permanent. The great “Dictionary” is superseded by wider and more accurate linguistic knowledge; the succinct and sententious biographies are replaced, where their subjects are sufficiently important, by closer criticisms and by antiquarian details, while in the majority of his subjects the Lives and Works of the writers are alike forgotten. The “Rambler” and the “Idler” stand among the British Essayists, dust-worn and silent; and though a well-informed Englishman would recognise a quotation from “Rasselas” or “London,” he would hardly be expected to remember the context.[1] But the “Johnsoniad” keeps fresh among us the noble image of the moralist and the man, and when a philosopher of our time says pleasantly of Boswell what Heinrich Heine said gravely of Goethe, that he measures the literary faculty of his friends by the extent of their appreciation of his idol, it is to a composite creation of the genius of the master and of the sympathetic talent of the disciple that is paid this singular homage. For it was assuredly a certain analogy of character that fitted Boswell to be the friendly devotee and intellectual servitor of Dr. Johnson, and the resemblances of style and manner which are visible even in the fragments brought together in this volume cannot be regarded as parodies or conscious imitations, but rather as illustrations of the mental harmony which enabled the reporter to produce with such signal fidelity, in the words of another, his own ideal of all that was good and great.