company and the circumstances. We must know the company and the circumstances before we can understand the talk. It is one of Boswell’s greatest merits that he is careful of his background; wherever it is possible he gives us a full and true account of the persons present, and the incidents and remarks that prompted Johnson’s speech.
Another cause of Boswell’s superiority is his care for truth, even in the minutest details. Some part of this care he may have learned from his master; like Reynolds, he was ‘of Johnson’s school.’ Perhaps no book so rich in opportunities for error has ever come through a century of minute study and criticism with so little damage to its reputation as Boswell’s Life. The author invented nothing and suppressed nothing, and his book stands. Yet in the main his details contribute to the portrait, and that portrait is Boswell’s Johnson. A little emphasis here and there, a judicious management of the light, a lively touch of the brush or of the pen,—these are enough for the painter or the biographer who wishes to convey his own meaning. All later writers on Johnson are copyists of Boswell. Macaulay exaggerated the picture and vulgarized it, but suggestions for his caricature are already to be found in Boswell. Take, for instance, the question of Johnson’s manner of eating. Boswell’s description is well known. ‘I never knew any man who relished good eating as he did. When at table, he was totally absorbed in the business of the moment; his looks seemed rivetted to his plate; nor would he, unless when in very high company, say one word, or even pay the least attention to what was said by others, till he had satisfied his appetite, which was so fierce, and indulged with such intenseness, that while in the act of eating,
