Page:Six Essays on Johnson.djvu/40

contained and simple as a child—often, too, as wayward as a child. A kind of luminous sincerity and individuality is what makes him so irresistible. Report, even the report of Boswell, probably does too little justice to the incalculable part of Johnson’s character—to the sayings that he uttered when he was thinking aloud. A reporter remembers what he understands, and sets down what his readers will appreciate. The genius of Boswell appears not least in this, that he was willing, on occasion, to record Johnson’s most whimsical and irresponsible remarks. But he must have omitted or neglected by far the greater number. Those that he has preserved are perhaps the most delightful and convincing things in his book. ‘I find,’ said Johnson, after his interview with King George, ‘that it does a man good to be talked to by his Sovereign. In the first place, a man cannot be in a passion——’ Here he was interrupted, and his account of other lesser advantages is lost to the world. ‘A man who rides out for an appetite,’ he once said, ‘consults but little the dignity of human nature.’ Or take Boswell’s half-apologetic record of an evening spent at Mr. Robert Chambers’s in the Temple, in the company of a gentleman who had just employed Mr. Chambers to draft his will, devising his estate to his three sisters, in preference to a remote heir male. Johnson called the sisters ' ‘three dowdies,’ and maintained that an ancient estate should always go to males.

I have known him at times [says the biographer] exceedingly diverted at what seemed to others a very small sport. He now laughed immoderately, without any reason that we could perceive, at our friend’s making his will; called him the testator, and added, ‘I daresay he thinks he has done a mighty thing. He won’t stay