It was this habit of painstaking accuracy, rather than good taste, which led him to avoid the vice of rhetorical amplification. It also prevented him from missing the point of a joke of which he was unconscious. As a rule, his 'Johnsoniana' are better than those of Sir John Hawkins or Mrs. Piozzi, because they are more literal. In one or two instances an embellishment which improved a story was rejected by him because it was not true. These powers--observation, scrupulous accuracy and industry, and enthusiastic admiration of his hero--were all that he needed for the production of a great book; for Dr. Johnson was so unaffected, so outspoken, and so entertaining a man, and every sentence he uttered was so characteristic, that realism was a far better method for his biographer than analysis. Perhaps it is always better when the subject is strongly marked. That Dr. Johnson was a good subject is so evident that the mere statement is sufficient. Mrs. Thrale-Piozzi's and even Sir John Hawkins's books are entertaining simply because they are about him. The eighteenth-century man presents a number of excellent features for literary portraiture, because he is a compound of formality and explosiveness. The formal manners and dress and ponderous courtesy of the eighteenth century, combined with an outspoken way of calling things by their right names and a boyish petulance and quickness of temper, make a contrast that is essentially humorous, and more attractive than the philosophic and broad-minded temper of earlier times or the reticence and indifference of our own day. Dr. Johnson was a typical eighteenth-century man, and epitomized these contrasts. Personally, too, he was a man for whom we must feel the most profound regard and respect. He represents the normal Englishman, a compound of moral integrity, rooted prejudice, and hatred of shams, with a mind which works mechanically and a kind heart. We instinctively recognize this compound as the ancestral type of our race, and are drawn to it. The real power of our race depends upon the simplicity and solid humanity of this central type, the heavy-armed and disciplined infantry about which are grouped the more gifted and erratic types, the scouts and light-horse of civilization. For these general reasons Samuel Johnson seems to us the best sitter for a literary portrait that ever fell into the hands of a literary painter, and the excellence of his biography to depend quite as much upon the fact that it is a life of Samuel Johnson as upon the fact that it is a life by James Boswell.