by writing about him.' Boswell seems to have had some such idea in mind regarding Johnson. And he was, as Henley has pointed out, fully alive to the enduring merits of his achievement: "I will venture to say," he wrote, "that he (Johnson) will be seen in this work more completely than any man that has ever lived."

Nor is this all. They have been blamed and praised de profundis in excelsis. Shakespeare is patronised by Broadway; Macaulay explicitly declares that Boswell wrote one of the most charming of books because he was one of the greatest of fools. They have been idolised perhaps; but they have suffered above the average at the hands of posterity, from the ignorance of their editors and the stupidity of readers the world over. A plague on all cowards!

III

'Délassons-nous un peu à parler de M. de Pontmartin,' says Sainte-Beuve, at the outset of a causerie. Not that there is any connection (to paraphrase Mr. Austin Dobson) between M. de Pontmartin and Boswell of whom I shall speak; nor let me hasten to add-between myself and the keenest and finest of French literary critics.' But that Boswell has been for

years the cheerful companion of many an hour's relaxation; and I, for one, never tire of referring to him. Mr. Augustine Birrell, the most charming of Johnsonians - I am everlastingly indebted to him for that essay on Falstaff-insists that when he is finally 'kicked out of office,' he will retire into the country and really read Boswell. An enviable ambition! What is most distinctive in Boswell is Boswell's method and Boswell's manner; yet from the very outset, it would seem, he was considerably 'edited.' We must forget his editors if we would really read Boswell.' Long ago Johnson, referring to the Corsican tour, had touched upon the personal quality in his writings.

"Your History," he said, “is like other histories, but your Journal is in a very high degree curious and delightful . . . Your History was copied from books; your Journal rose out of your own experience and observation. You express images which operated strongly upon yourself, and you have impressed them with great force upon your readers."

From less

Mr.

friendly critics the verdict was the same. Austin Dobson has a very interesting note on the subject. His essay, Boswell's Predecessors and Editors is well worth reading. "Gray, who has been 'pleased and moved strangely,' declares it proves what he has al

ways maintained, that any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.' This faculty of communicating his impressions accurately to his reader is Boswell's most conspicuous gift. Present in his first book, it was more present in his second, and when he began his great biography it had reached its highest point. So individual is his manner, so unique his method of collecting and arranging his information, that to disturb the native character of his narrative by interpolating foreign material, must of necessity impair its specific character and imperil its personal note. Yet, by some strange freak of fate, this was just the very treatment to which it was subjected." It seems that "Boswell, like many writers of his temperament, was fond of stimulating his flagging invention by miscellaneous advice, and it is plain from the comparison of his finished work with his rough notes, that in order to make his anecdotes more direct and effective he freely manipulated his reminiscences "; much as Shakespeare manipulated Plutarch, Holinshed and the old plays he rewrote. "But it is quite probable and this is a point that we do not remember to have seen touched on that much of the trimming which his records received is attributable to Malone. At all events, when

Malone took up the editing after Boswell's death, he is known to have made many minor alterations in the process of 'settling the text,' and it is only reasonable to suppose that he had done the same thing in the author's lifetime, a supposition which would account for some at least of the variations which have been observed between Boswell's anecdotes in their earliest and their latest forms. But the admitted alterations of Malone were but trifles compared with the extraordinary readjustment which the book, as Malone left it, received at the hands of Mr. Croker." Nor was Croker the only offender; their name is legion Macaulay, Carlyle, Lockhart, (writing to Murray, the publisher, Jan. 19, 1829, he said, ' Pray ask Croker whether Boswell's account of the Hebridean Tour ought not to be melted into the book,' very much as Sir Herbert Tree 'melted' Falstaff via the clothes-basket out of Henry IV into the Merry Wives of Windsor), Carruthers, Fitzgerald and who not. His days of sorrowing are probably not yet ended, despite Henley's spirited appeal that he be given without further parley that high place among the great artists of all time that is his by every claim of genius. The Baconians assail the imperturbable figure of Shakespeare much as England once jeered at Napoleon and the French

or we at England; why should Boswell be permitted to go scot-free? The heroes of antiquity, erect above the hurrying crowds, present a target for posterity that wakes the urchin in us; we cannot pass them by without hurling an occasional stone. An occasional stone!

I own to a very genuine affection for Mr. Bernard Shaw; I cannot, however, always find it in my heart to forgive him the madness of his pranks. "It was in As You Like It that the sententious William first began to openly exploit the fondness of the British Public for sham moralizing and stage philosophizing. It contains one passage that specially exasperates me. Jacques, who spends his time, like Hamlet, in vainly emulating the wisdom of Sancho Panza," Mr. Shaw forgets that the wisdom of Sancho Panza is the wisdom of the Spanish peasantry, an accumulation of generations of honest toil and thrifty living comes in laughing in a superior manner "— the misinterpretation is Mr. Shaw's; there was nothing superior in the laughter of Mr. Fuller Mellish when last he played the part; 'twas as wholehearted as a yokel's at the village fair—“ because he has met a fool in the forest who

Says very wisely, It is ten o'clock,

Thus we may see (quoth he) how the world wags.