treated about love. Johnson joined battle in a moment. ‘It is not,’ he said, ‘because they treat, as you call it, about love, but because they treat of nothing, that they are despicable: we must not ridicule a passion which he who never felt never was happy, and he who laughs at never deserves to feel—a passion which has caused the change of empires and the loss of worlds—a passion which has inspired heroism and subdued avarice.’
Perhaps Boswell shows Johnson in too uniformly solemn a light. The seriousness of his own attitude, and his strong predilection for argument on grave topics, may have conduced to this. He must have felt that the whimsical and humorous side of Johnson’s character did not sufficiently appear in the Life, for he appealed to Miss Burney to give him some material of a lighter kind. She was well able to do this, but was thrifty and wise enough to keep what she had for her own use. Doubtless when Boswell saw Johnson talking with great gaiety and pleasantry to Miss Burney, he was disquieted to recognize a vein that was not common in his own discourses with the sage. The other biographers almost all make a point of Johnson’s playfulness. ‘In the talent of humour,’ says Hawkins, ‘there hardly ever was his equal, except perhaps among the old comedians, such as Tarleton, and a few others mentioned by Cibber.’ ‘Dr. Johnson has more fun,’ said Miss Burney, ‘and comical humour, and love of nonsense about him, than almost anybody I ever saw.’ Mr. Murphy, according to Mrs. Thrale, always said that he was incomparable at buffoonery. All this may no doubt be inferred from Boswell’s pages, but is not very fully represented there, so that some of the most fascinating passages of Miss Burney’s Diary surprise us by the novelty of the
