'mutual admiration'; and such admiration, when it has a fair excuse, is the best security for forming the kind of soil in which the flower of talk grows spontaneously.
Talk, said Holmes, is 'to me only spading up the ground for crops of thought.' He was half his time 'interviewing himself’ and looking for his own thoughts, 'as a schoolboy turns his pockets inside out to find what is in them.' The Autocrat is the outcome of this investigation. It might have been more amusing to watch the actual process; but a reader may be content to get the fine extract. Holmes, as he intimates himself, was his own Boswell. He had a quaint satisfaction in following the career of Johnson, whose age differed by exactly a century from his own, and missed an old companion when he outlived his parallel. It would be absurd to make a comparison, as a Johnson fused with a Boswell would have been a singularly different person. Indeed, the most obvious peculiarity of Holmes's mind is one to which his ponderous predecessor could make no pretension. Johnson went into conversation like a gladiator into the arena; and if Holmes could have met him the pair would have been like a Spanish bull encountered by a dexter-
