For the purposes of his biographer, Dr. Johnson scarcely left London. Beyond a brief visit to Paris, only a tour through the Hebrides; this an event so colossal in its elevation above the flat level of his outward existence, like the church towers in a Dutch landscape, that it is treated as a thing quite apart, has a volume to itself, severed from its before and after. Boswell gives letters, certainly, and many; yet, in the matter of character portrayal, what are they alongside of the talk? And also, more pertinent, what to Boswell was even the talk, compared with the intercourse to which the talk was incident? In this he immersed himself and his strong receptive powers, absorbing the impression which he has so skilfully reproduced. Such apprehension as Boswell thus gained for himself is no neutral acquirement; it is a working force, instinctively selective from that on which it feeds, and intuitive in its power of arrangement. To copy his result is futile. Like Nelson, there is but one Boswell; but it may be permitted to believe that lesser men will profit to the extent of their capacities by adopting his method. This possibly he never formulated, in that again proving his genius, the unconscious faculty of a very self-conscious man; but I conceive the process to have been, first know your subject yourself thoroughly by close contact and sympathy, and then so handle your material as to bring out to the reader the image revealed to you. This is, in a measure, a plea for picturesque treatment of biography and of history; not by gaudy coloring and violent contrasts, striving after rhetorical effect, but in the observance of proportion, of grouping, of subordination to a central idea; not content with mere narration, however accurate in details. A narrative which fails in portrayal, in picturesque impression, is not accurate; and a biography which presents a man's thoughts and acts, yet does not over and above them fashion his personality to the reader, is a failure. How much conscious effort may be necessary to the due handling of materials, I certainly cannot undertake to say; but persuaded I am that the utmost results possible to any particular man can be attained only by passive assimilation, and that so they will be attained to the measure of his individual capacity. By such digestion a theme apparently dry may be quickened to interest. Though not a lawyer, nor a student of constitutions, I found Stubbs's _Constitutional History of England_ fascinating. I have not analyzed my pleasure, but I believe it to have been due to portrayal; to arrangement of data by a man exceptionally gifted for vivid presentation, who had so lived with his subject that it had realized itself to him as a living whole, which he successfully conveyed to his readers. There is no disjointment. The result is a great historical picture; or a biography, of law as a benevolent developing personality, moving amid the struggles and miseries of the