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as they can, and argue as to the justice of the various charges of rudeness and so forth. Some of them, who, from no fault of Dr. Hill's, fill rather more pages than we could wish, think that a great man ought to be mainly the hero of a religious tract, and treat us simply to minute and painful descriptions of the poor man's last days. In any case, the real Johnson is for them the author, and their function is simply to satisfy the curiosity of his readers. Boswell being, in however quaint a fashion, a man of real genius, saw instinctively something more. Johnson was, in the first place, his oracle—the man who has extracted the truth implicitly written in the book of human life. But then, besides this, Johnson might also be considered as himself a page in the book. To understand his significance we must take not merely his utterances, but their whole setting, the 'environment' as well as the individual. Boswell has to study the Johnson circle as he was sent to study Wapping. Charing Cross is profoundly interesting because through it flows a full tide of humanities. The biography is not merely an account of Johnson, but what we should call a study of human life. Johnson himself is, of course, in the foreground—he was, so to speak,