"BOSWELL. 'Sir ..., you never will allow merit to a player.' JOHNSON. 'Merit, Sir! what merit? Do you respect a rope-dancer, or a ballad-singer?' BOSWELL. 'No, Sir: but we respect a great player, as a man who can conceive lofty sentiments and can express them gracefully.' JOHNSON. 'What, Sir, a fellow who claps a hump on his back, and a lump on his leg, and cries "_I am Richard the Third?_"' ... BOSWELL. 'My dear Sir! you may turn anything into ridicule ... a great player does what very few are capable to do: his art is a very rare faculty. _Who_ can repeat Hamlet's soliloquy, "To be, or not to be," as Garrick does it?' JOHNSON. 'Anybody may. Jemmy, there (a boy about eight years old, who was in the room), will do it as well in a week.' BOSWELL. 'No, no, Sir: and as a proof of the merit of great acting, and of the value which mankind set upon it, Garrick has got a hundred thousand pounds.' JOHNSON. 'Is getting a hundred thousand pounds a proof of excellence? That has been done by a scoundrel commissary.'" Poor Bozzy! "I was _sure_, for once," he says, "that I had the best side of the argument." As if that made any difference to Johnson when he was "talking for victory"! Both Garrick and Johnson were lovers of books--but in a different way. Johnson was "born to grapple with whole libraries," as Boswell's uncle said, but he did not treat a rare volume with the tender care of a collector. When he was putting his books in order, he wore a pair of large gloves "such as hedgers use," and "buffeted" them so that clouds of dust flew round him. When he was reading a new book it was said that "he tore out the heart of it"; when he was tidying his old ones it is to be feared that he sometimes tore off the covers of them. Garrick had some old and valued editions, and seems to have offended Johnson by hesitating to lend them to him. Even Boswell admits that "considering the slovenly and careless manner in which books were treated by Johnson, it could not be expected that scarce and valuable editions should have been lent to him." Garrick, moreover, had learnt by experience. Here is the story as he told it to Miss Burney: "'David!' said Johnson, 'will you lend me your _Petrarca_[23]?' 'Y-e-s, Sir!' 'David! you sigh?' 'Sir--you shall have it certainly.' Accordingly the book, stupendously bound, I sent to him that very evening. But scarcely had he taken it in his hands, when, as Boswell tells me, he poured forth a Greek ejaculation and a couplet or two from Horace, and then in one of those fits of enthusiasm which always seem to require that he should spread his arms aloft, he suddenly pounces my poor _Petrarca_ over his head upon the floor. And then, standing for several minutes lost in abstraction, he forgot probably that he had ever seen it." As his old schoolmaster, Johnson took good care that Garrick should not suffer from swelled head: