Carlyle, in the theory of hero-worship, has made capital use of Boswell. He sees the strong mind of Johnson leading 'the poor flimsy little soul' of James Boswell; he feels 'the devout Discipleship, the gyrating observantly round the great constellation.' He has Boswell's reiterated declarations to support him. On one side Carlyle's vindication of the biographer is successful; he errs in emphasizing the discovery by Boswell of the Rambler. In such a discovery Langton and Beauclerk had long preceded him, and the Johnson that Boswell met in Davies' parlour was the pensioned writer who had out-lived his dark days, and was the literary dictator of the day, and the associate of Burke and of Reynolds. But Carlyle comes nearer the truth when he touches on the Boswellian recipe for being graphic--the possession of an open, loving heart, and what follows from the possession of such. Like White of Selborne, with his sparrows and cockchafers, Boswell, too, has copied some true sentences from the inspired book of nature. But however this may account for his insight--the heart seeing farther than the head--it will not account for his literary qualities. Of all his contemporaries, Goldsmith and Burke excepted, no one is a greater master of a pure prose style than Boswell, and for ease of narrative, felicity of phrase, and rounded diction he is incomparable. Macaulay believed a London apprentice could detect Scotticisms in Robertson; Hume's style is often vicious by Gallicisms and Scots law phrases which nothing but his expository gifts have obscured from the critics. Beattie confesses learning English as a dead language and taking several years over the task. But Boswell, 'scarce by North Britons now esteemed a Scot,' writes with an ease that renders his style his own. 'The fact is,' says Mr Cotter Morison, 'that no dramatist or novelist of the whole century surpassed or even equalled Boswell in rounded and clear and picturesque presentation, or in real dramatic faculty.' Let us take one portrait from the Boswell gallery--the meeting of the two old Pembroke men, Johnson and Oliver Edwards.