Boswell's books are veritable books. Few books have had such a severe test applied to them. His first was dedicated to Paoli, whose sanction must be taken to guarantee every line of it. "In every narrative," he writes in the dedication to Malone of the _Journal_, "whether historical or biographical, authenticity is of the utmost consequence. Of this I have ever been so firmly persuaded that I inscribed a former work to that person who was the best judge of its truth. Of this work the manuscript was daily read by Johnson, and you have perused the original and can vouch for the strict fidelity of the present publication." His _Life of Johnson_ was as fearlessly dedicated to Sir Joshua Reynolds, one whose intimacy with Johnson could stamp, with assured knowledge of the subject, the credit and success of the work. Among the 'some dozen, or baker's dozen, and those chiefly of very ancient date,' of reliable biographies whose paucity Carlyle laments, the works of Boswell may be safely included. Their accuracy is confessed by workers in all fields. His _Tour_ created a type; no better volume of travels has ever been written than the _Journal_; and the critic who has dealt at the reputation of Boswell its heaviest blow has yet to confess, that Homer is no more the first of poets, Shakespeare the first of dramatists, Demosthenes the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers, with no second. How is this? Written in 1831, before Lockhart Southey and Carlyle by their biographies of Scott, Nelson, and Frederick had appeared as rivals, why is it no less true now? What singular gift or quality can account for this singular aloofness from the ordinary or extraordinary class of writers? Why does Boswell yet wear the crown of indivisible supremacy in biography? His own words will not explain it, the possession of Johnson's intimacy, the twenty years' view of his subject, his faculty for recollecting, and his assiduity in recording communications. This and more than this Lockhart possessed, the nearest rival to the biographical throne. He was the son-in-law of his subject, for whom he had as true an admiration as Boswell had for Johnson. But Boswell was only in the company of his idol some 180 days, or 276 if we include the time on the tour in Scotland, in all the twenty years of his acquaintance. Lockhart had the journals of Sir Walter, and the communications of nearly a hundred persons. A comparison in any sense, literary, social, or moral, would have been felt by Lockhart as an insult, for he clearly regards Sir Alexander Boswell as a greater man than his father. But if, like the grandsire of Hubert at Hastings, Lockhart has drawn a good bow, Boswell, like the Locksley of the novelist, has notched his shaft, and comparisons have long ceased to be instituted. Gray has attempted the explanation--a fool with a note-book. He has invented nothing, he has only reported. But every year sees that