reviews, or dedications he wrote in a year,—some years he wrote nothing,—but on his own sturdy and splendid personality; "the real primate, the soul's teacher of all England," says Carlyle; a great embodiment of uncompromising goodness and sense. Every generation needs such a man, not to compile dictionaries, but to preserve the balance of sanity, and few generations are blest enough to possess him. As for Boswell, he might have toiled in the law courts until he was gray without benefiting or amusing anybody. It was in the nights he spent drinking port wine at the Mitre, and in the days he spent trotting, like a terrier, at his master's heels, that the seed was sown which was to give the world a masterpiece of literature, the most delightful biography that has ever enriched mankind. It is to leisure that we owe the "Life of Johnson," and a heavy debt we must, in all integrity, acknowledge it to be.
Mr. Shortreed said truly of Sir Walter Scott that he was "making himself in the busy, idle pleasures of his youth; "in those long rambles by hill and dale, those whimsical adventures in farmhouses, those merry, pur-
