"reason to rejoice that Columbus found at last reception and employment." 1

This was not pure Toryism. "How is it," he asked, "that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?" And once when in company with some very grave men at Oxford, his toast was, 'Here's to the next insurrection of negroes in the West Indies."" He had a negro, Francis Barber, in his house for years, whom he educated, and who was supposed to be his servant. Boswell wishes to enter his "most solemn protest" against "the wild and dangerous attempt . . . to abolish so very important and necessary a branch of commercial interest" as the Slave Trade. It would involve robbery to our fellow-subjects, and "it would be extreme cruelty to the African Savages, a portion of whom it saves from massacre, or intolerable bondage in their own country, and introduces into a nuch happier state of life; especially now when their passage to the West Indies and their treatment there is humanely regulated. To abolish that trade would be to

Shut the gates of mercy on mankind.'

Whatever may have passed elsewhere concerning it, the HOUSE OF LORDS is wise and independent.” 3 —The Lords as ever the guardians of national righteousness and the Gospel.

With the death of Johnson the history of Boswell ends for most readers, though he lived for eleven more years, and spent seven of them on his great task with the steady aid of Malone. Malone, so far a stranger to him, picked up some proofs of the Hebrides at the printer's, and thence came an introduction and the intimacy of common labours. Boswell's letters to Temple make a melancholy story. He never had wished to be at the Scottish bar, and in his later years tried the English. Circuit he did not like

2

1 Life, i. 455; Johnson's Works, viii. 167. Cf. Life, iv. 250.
Johnson's Works, viii. 204.
Life, iii. pp. 200-204.

3

really because he did not like lawyers. The hard, shrewd, successful type saw nothing in him but a butt, and there was nothing to check their vulgar impulse to make game of him. But there are gleams of brightness. "I was the great man (as we used to say) at the late Drawing-room, in a suit of imperial blue lined with rose-coloured silk and ornamented with rich gold-wrought buttons. What a motley scene in life!" 1

He hoped for a seat in Parliament. Johnson and his friends had doubted whether it were desirable for him, but he longed for it.2 The first Lord Lonsdale 3 let him imagine he would give him one and kept him for months in attendance, so that in fact Mrs Boswell died alone, in spite of her husband's wild chase from London to be with her (1789). And then the blunt words: "I suppose you thought I was to bring you into Parliament; I never had any such intention," ended all.

There is a curious reminder of his political activities, and his one time fancy that he might represent Ayrshire, in Burns' Earnest Cry and Prayer to the Scotch Representatives in the House of Commons.

Could I like Montgomeries fight,

Or gab like Boswell,

says the poet. It is interesting to think of these two men together, contemporaries (Burns nineteen years the younger), and both from the same region. There are things common to both-the keen sensibility, the love of men and women, the gift of being liked, the gift of expression, and the fatal gift of being all things to all men. "The writing of imaginative literature," it has been well said, "had the curious effect of disintegrating personality, and strongly individual men were incapable of it. This was really what was meant by the artistic

2 Life, iv. 267.

1 Letter to Temple, 31 March 1789.
The earl who kept the young Wordsworths out of their own.
4 Letter to Temple, 21 June 1790.

temperament an unstable personality moving in many worlds, and not firmly anchored in any." 1 "1 To apply this sweepingly to men of such genius as Burns and Boswell would be rough and ready criticism at best, and yet the words are painfully suggestive, painfully near the fact, in each case. "In truth," wrote Boswell to Temple (21 July 1790), "I am sensible that I do not sufficiently 'try my ways,' as the Psalmist says, and am even almost inclined to think with you, that my great oracle Johnson did allow too much credit to good principles, without good practice."

» 2

But Johnson loved Boswell, and we love him-the more as we know him better. He has given us a great book-"the most entertaining book you ever read," he promised Temple (8 Feb. 1790)—but he has given us more. He has drawn us a great man-with all the uncompromising fidelity of a whole-hearted believer in him; "he would not cut off his claws," he told Hannah More, "nor make a tiger a cat to please anybody." It is not every one who can "carry a bon-mot," as one of the great circle remarked, and the fugitive charm of talk is the hardest thing to keep on paper-if one is loyal to fact. And, again, the great man may be lost in the anecdotes about him. But of Boswell's book Sir Joshua Reynolds, a great man himself and a lifelong friend of Johnson, said that it might be depended upon as if delivered upon oath; and Burke, another friend of many years, said "he is greater in Boswell's books than his own." But perhaps as good a measure of what Boswell has done may be had from the curious interest with which we read the question put by Horace Walpole to Mason in a letter of 1776: "Will Dr Johnson,

1 The Comments of Bagshot, ch. 4.

2 Cf. Life, iv. 397.

Cf. Jowett's words (Jowett's Life, ii. 33): "Let any one who believes that an ordinary man can write a great biography make the experiment himself... describe the most interesting dinner party"... and compare it with the Dilly dinner.

and I know not most of the rest by name, interest the next age like Addison, Prior, Pope, and Congreve ? " 1 He had no doubt as how the question would be answered; nor have we; and the discrepancy is explained when we remember that he reckoned without Boswell.

If, as Charles Lamb suggested, we should have a "grace before books," what should we say when we have read through Boswell? What should we feel? Johnson used to say that "want of tenderness was want of parts and was no less a proof of stupidity than depravity." 2 Is he not right? What could be expected of a man who could read the Life of Johnson and the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and remain so incapable of tenderness as not to love the man who wrote them?

'Letter No. 1732 in Mrs Toynbee's edition.

2 Life, ii. 122.

O

CRABBE

NE day at the end of February or in the beginning of March 1781 a letter of some little length was delivered to Edmund Burke.

The

American War was more and more clearly approaching its inevitable end, and the final struggle of the Opposition with Lord North was at its fiercest. Burke was living under the greatest pressure that a statesman can know, and one glance at the letter might, in the opinion of most men of affairs, have absolved him from further attention to it.

The first paragraph explained the situation perfectly 1 "I am one of those outcasts on the World, who are without a Friend, without Employment and without Bread." Burke was not an ordinary English gentleman unfamiliar with want. For nine years he had lived, he best knew how, for he said little of it, a life of struggle and uncertainty in London; and the greatest of his friends could tell the same story—indeed had told it :

Yet think what ills the scholar's life assail,
Toil, envy, want, the Patron, and the jail.

"Having used every honest means in vain," said the writer of the letter, "I yesterday confess'd my Inabillity, and obtain'd with much entreaty and as the greatest Favor, a week's forbearance, when I am positively told, that I must pay the money or prepare for a Prison." So familar was the story; and the conclusion was the natural one. "I have no other Pretensions to your Favor than that I am an unhappy [man]. It is not easy to support the thoughts of Confinement; and I am 1 Transcribed from fac-simile in R. Huchon, George Crabbe and His Times.