circumvallation" of James Boswell, who now emphatically challenges reconsideration, not as a satellite, but as the fiery center of his own turbulent system.
The impression that Boswell derives all his interest from his relation to Johnson is an error which this edition of his letters will help to explode. This erroneous impression is due, first, to the great biography and then to two famous essays on the biography by Macaulay and by Carlyle. Macaulay, as every one remembers, spitted Boswell on a glittering antithesis: "Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all." Macaulay went on to prove that Boswell's achievement was due precisely to the fact that he was an officious, inquisitive, insensible, toad-eating fool, and that he possessed "absolutely none" of "the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers." Carlyle, himself a biographer of a new style, disrelished Macaulay's recipe for supremacy in the biographical art. He declared this estimate of Boswell egregiously wrong, assured the world that every great work is the fruit of virtues and not of vices, and, in accordance with his own favorite doctrine, he explained Boswell as a man eminently endowed with the supreme virtue of hero-worship. Thus Macaulay and Carlyle both place Boswell in the list of Johnson's dependents.
Carlyle's theory is not, like Macaulay's, positively silly, but it is quite inadequate. It doesn't really touch: Boswell's center. Hero-worship certainly was not the mainspring in Boswell. No one can scrutinize intimately his inner workings and fail to recognize that he burns with a flaming desire to be a great man in his own right. He also would rather like, if he could
