believed that all other boot-wearers practise the same impartiality? Boswell can hardly have known this; yet Johnson’s note on the tailor in King John, who, in his haste, falsely thrusts his slippers upon contrary feet, leaves no room for doubt. ‘Shakespeare,’ says Johnson, ‘seems to have confounded a man’s shoes with his gloves. He that is frighted or hurried may put his hand into the wrong glove, but either shoe will equally admit either foot. The authour seems to be disturbed by the disorder which he describes.’ This is a topic which demands, and would well repay, the expert labours of academic research. Very little is known about Johnson’s boots.
A great part of an editor’s work is in its nature perishable. Some of his notes are in time superseded; some are shown to be wrong; some are accepted and embodied in the common stock of knowledge. Of all Johnson’s annotations on Shakespeare those which record his own tastes and habits have preserved most of freshness and interest. It is a privilege to be able to hear him talking without the intervention of Boswell; we can in some ways come closer to him when that eager presence is removed. It is the greatness of Boswell’s achievement that he has made Johnson familiar to us; but the very zeal and reverence of the biographer inevitably infect the reader, who is admitted to the intimacies of a man of companionable genius as if to a shrine. Boswell made of biography a passionate science; and viewed his hero in a detached light. Nothing hurt him so much as the implication that any single detail or remark of his recording was inaccurately or carelessly set down. His self-abnegation is complete; where he permits himself to appear it is only that he may exhibit his subject to
