answer was prompt. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘he was a fool. The right word never came to him. If you gave him back a bad shilling, he’d say, “Why, it’s as good a shilling as ever was born.” You know he ought to have said coined. Coined, sir, never entered his head. He was a fool, sir.’
From all this it follows that Boswell’s opinion of Goldsmith is hardly of greater value than Carlyle’s opinion of Lamb. ‘A more pitiful, ricketty, gasping, staggering, stammering Tom-fool,’ wrote Carlyle, ‘I do not know….’ ‘Poor Lamb! Poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius!’ Boswell did not pillory himself in quite this zealous fashion, but his treatment of Goldsmith remains the most conspicuous of his errors.
The memories of Johnson preserved by Mrs. Thrale help out the picture of the non-combative side of his character. He lived with the Thrales as a member of their family; he joined in the children’s games, and was not at all offended when, choosing animals as the counterparts of their various acquaintance, they pitched upon the elephant as his resemblance. If Boswell had passed so long a time under the same roof with him, we should doubtless have had a minute account of the course of his daily life. Mrs. Thrale has left us nothing of the kind; she observes the reticence of a hostess, and gives us barely a hint of the domestic problems that must have been presented to her by the habits of her exacting guest. She has been accused of writing her Anecdotes in self-defence, as a kind of apology for the last sad alienation, but there is little enough ground for this charge; her work is the work of a generous temper, and is a credit to her memory. Life at Streatham was
