He was ever the sworn enemy of speciousness, of nonsense, of
idle and insincere speculation, of the mind that does not take seriously
the duty of making itself up, of neglect in the gravest consideration of
life. He insisted upon the rights and dignity of the individual man,
and at the same time upon the vital necessity to him of reverence
and submission, and no man ever more beautifully illustrated their
interdependence, and their exquisite combination in a noble nature.
Boswell's Johnson is consistently and primarily the life of one man.
Incidentally it is more, for through it one is carried from his own
present limitations into a spacious and genial world. The reader there
meets a vast number of people, men, women, children, nay even animals,
from George the Third down to the cat Hodge. By the author's magic each
is alive, and the reader mingles with them as with his acquaintances.
It is a varied world, and includes the smoky and swarming courts and
highways of London, its stately drawing-rooms, its cheerful inns,
its shops and markets, and beyond is the highroad which we travel in
lumbering coach or speeding postchaise to venerable Oxford with its
polite and leisurely dons, or to the staunch little cathedral city of
Lichfield, welcoming back its famous son to dinner and tea, or to the
seat of a country squire, or ducal castle, or village tavern, or the
grim but hospitable feudal life of the Hebrides.
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