But that is hardly just. It might even be more true to say that
Johnson owes his immortality to Boswell. What of him would remain to-day
but for the man who took his scourgings so humbly and repaid them by
licking the boot that kicked him? Who now reads _London_, or _The Vanity of
Human Wishes_, or _The Rambler_? I once read _Rasselas_, and found it
pompous and dull. And I have read _The Lives of the Poets_, and though they
are not pompous and dull, they are often singularly poor criticism, and the
essay on Milton is, in some respects, as mean a piece of work as ever came
out of Grub Street.
But _The Life_! What in all the world of books is there like it? I have
been reading it off and on for more than thirty years, and still find it
inexhaustible. It ripens with the years. It is so intimate that it seems to
be a record of my own experiences. I have dined so often with Johnson at
the Mitre and Sir Joshua's and Langton's and the rest that I know him far
better than the shadows I meet in daily life.
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