member of the Essex Head Club. To the formal Lives there must also be added the many valuable memories incidentally preserved by Miss Burney, Miss Hannah More, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Bishop Percy, and others of Johnson’s friends and acquaintances. Never was there a more ignorant fable than the fable which makes Boswell the creator of Johnson’s greatness. ‘The death of Doctor Johnson,’ says Murphy, ‘kept the public mind in agitation beyond all former example. No literary character ever excited so much attention.’ ‘His death,’ wrote Hannah More, ‘made a kind of era in literature.’ There is a cloud of witnesses to the pre-eminence and influence of Johnson. Yet Boswell has so far set himself in glory above his peers that no other witnesses are much esteemed. Hence it is worth the pains to inquire—What should we know of Johnson if Boswell had never written? How far is Boswell’s account confirmed by the testimony of others? Can Boswell’s narrative be shown to be in any respect biased, or partial, or erroneous?
The first of these questions is easily answered. If Boswell had never lived, or if he had never turned his face towards that noblest prospect for a Scotchman, the high road that leads to England, we should still know more of Johnson than we know of Swift; and we know more of Swift, by way of personal reminiscence, than we know of any other of our great writers before the time of Johnson. The recorded impressions of Delany, Sheridan, Mrs. Pilkington, and others, enable us to see Swift as he lived, and to overhear his casual discourse. Compared with him Addison is a mere ghost. For twelve years of his life Addison resided at Oxford, first at Queen’s College, and then at Magdalen. He is said
