obliged to you, sir,' cried Johnson, bowing and turning his head to him with a look for some time of 'surly virtue,' but in a short while of complacency."—It is by this dramatic power that Boswell gives us, not Johnson's talk merely, but Johnson himself; thanks to Boswell, we know Johnson, not as we know the subject of many another biography, but rather as we know some of the characters whom fiction has made to live for us—as we know Falstaff, or Don Quixote, for instance. Now, Johnson's talk itself profits somewhat, no doubt, in effect by Boswell's setting; this skilful dramatist nearly always contrives that the curtain shall fall on a victory of the hero. We cannot always repress a suspicion that Johnson is allowed to score rather easily, and that a fairly good antagonist might have made a better fight of it; the bowling seems to collapse before his batting. However, there is no doubt at all as to his extraordinary impressiveness for his contemporaries. There are many other contemporary witnesses besides Boswell. Probably no one except Johnson was ever the recipient of a round-robin signed by four names of such varied lustre as those of Burke, Joshua Reynolds, Gibbon, and Sheridan. It was a small incident perhaps in itself, but what a position it implies for Johnson, what a command of admiring affection from the strongest and brightest minds of that day! And this position, though the result partly of his writings and partly of his character, was principally due to the impression of sagacity
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