In the _Tour_, that is, he had approved himself an original master of selection, composition, and design; of the art of working a large number of essential details into a uniform and living whole; and of that most difficult and telling of accomplishments, the reproduction of talk. In the _Life_ he repeated the proof on a larger scale and with a finer mastery of construction and effect; and in what his best editor describes as 'the task of correcting, amending, and adding to his darling work' he spent his few remaining years. That he drifted into greatness, produced his two masterpieces unconsciously, and developed a genius for biography as one develops a disease, is 'a ridiculous conception,' as Mr. Napier rightly says. In proof of it we have Boswell's own words, and we have the books themselves. Such testimony is not to be overborne by any number of paradoxes, however ingenious, nor by any superflux of rhetoric, however plausible and persuasive. That Boswell was a gossip, a busybody, and something of a sot, and that many did and still do call him fool, is certain; but that is no reason why he should not have been an artist, and none why he should be credited with the fame of having devoted the best part of his life to the production of a couple of masterpieces--as M. Jourdain talked prose--without knowing what he was doing. Turner chose to go a-masquerading as 'Puggy Booth'; but as yet nobody has put forward the assertion that Turner was unconscious of the romance and splendour of his _Ulysses and Polyphemus_, or that he painted his _Rain_, _Speed_, _and Steam_ in absolute ignorance of the impression it would produce and the idea it should convey. Goldsmith reminded Miss Reynolds of 'a low mechanic, particularly . . . a journey-man tailor'; but that he was unconsciously the most elegant and natural writer of his age is a position which has not yet been advanced. And surely it is high time that Boswell should take that place in art which is his by right of conquest, and that Macaulay's paradox--which is only the opinion brilliantly put of an ignorant and unthinking world--('Il avait mieux que personne l'esprit de tout le monde')--should go the way of all its kind. CONGREVE His Biographers and Critics.