I quite admit that Dr. Birkbeck Hill has given a quantity of information in his notes which has little or no direct bearing upon Johnson himself, or upon Boswell's discharge of his biographical duties. But I also confess that I have found such notes very pleasant reading, and been grateful for them. I like an occasional excursion into matters suggested by the text and illustrative of the period. If Mr. Fitzgerald does not like them, he has after all the simple remedy of not reading them. To give an example: Mr. Fitzgerald ridicules a note (Hill's Boswell, iii. 241) in which Dr. Birkbeck Hill illustrates by several quotations the curious change in the meaning of the word 'respectable.' Chesterfield speaks, for example, of the hour of death as 'at least a very respectable one,' and Hannah More thinks a roomful of portraits of admirals a 'respectable sight.' The note is certainly superfluous, but I am grateful for the knowledge conveyed in a few lines as to a really curious instance of the shifting of meaning in a familiar word. Dr. Birkbeck Hill, again, defends Johnson against Macaulay's statement that he knew nothing of the country, and despised travelling. In the course of his remarks he gives the populations of Lichfield, Oxford, and Birmingham, where Johnson spent most of his early life, to show that they were then small country towns, and points out that a boyish perusal of Martin's account of the Hebrides had stimulated the curiosity long afterwards satisfied by the journey with Boswell. Mr. Fitzgerald ridicules these statements, which occur in a disquisition in Appendix B to the third volume. No doubt they are not strictly necessary, but to me they really illustrate some of Johnson's characteristic prejudices, and qualify one of Macaulay's slashing assaults. I was again innocent enough to be grateful for them.
This suggests another point. Mr. Fitzgerald ridicules Dr. Birkbeck Hill's enormous and self-made index. Undoubtedly it errs, if anything, by excess. That is a very rare fault, and a fault on the right side. I have found the index
