he replied, with his mouth half full, "it's
very good food for hogs!" "Then let me
help you to some mair o' 't," said the lady,
helping him bountifully.

"As we sailed along to Tallisker," says
Boswell, "Johnson got into one of his fits
of railing against the Scotch. 'We (the
English) have taught you,' said he, 'and
we'll do the same in time to all barbarous
nations; to the Cherokees, and at
last to the Ourang–Outangs.' On another
occasion he said, 'A Scotsman must be a
strong moralist, who does not prefer
Scotland to the truth.'"

Johnson was no doubt a very great man
in his own day, but in our day, we may,
without any unfair or undue depreciation
of his genius or merits, inquire what place
he would have held in the long roll of the
literary worthies of England, if it had not
been for James Boswell, the Scotsman, who
wrote his life. His fame has come down to
us large, solid, and sharply defined—not on
account of his writings—but on account of
his sayings, as recorded by that most painstaking
of biographers, the Laird of Auchinleck.
His literary reputation, outside of
Boswell's book, has but little to rest upon.
His Dictionary, the great work of his life,
was so incomplete that it had to be
supplemented, at a very early period of its
existence, by Todd, who added many
thousand words that had been ignorantly or
carelessly omitted. His novel of
Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia, is about the
clumsiest, prosiest, and least interesting
novel in the English language. His
tragedy of Irene was found to be unattractive,
unactable, and even unreadable, and has
long been dead and buried. His poetry
only survives in a few couplets that are
sometimes quoted, and scarcely tempts any
modern, reader to dip into it, when he
finds such a piece of pleonastic sing–song
at the threshold, as

       Let observation, with extensive view,
       Survey mankind from China to Peru.

His Essays in the Rambler are possibly
very clever; but it cannot be denied that
they are very dull. The only one of the
whole series which was ever popular, or
ever attracted any notice, says
Chalmers, in his Biographical Preface to that
ponderous collection, "was one which
Johnson did not write, and which was
communicated by Richardson, the author
of Clarissa Harlowe." His critique on
Milton's Paradise Lost, which still
survives as a specimen of eighteenth–century
opinion, is exceedingly unfair. Milton was
a Liberal and a Dissenter, while the critic
was an ultra–Tory and High Churchman;
and, bearing both facts in his mind, Johnson
allowed his literary judgment to be
uncharitably perverted by his politics.
In short, were it not for Boswell's Life
of Johnson, the great littérateur of the
eighteenth century would have been little
known in the nineteenth—except by name —
and his works would have been as obsolete
and antiquated as those of Dr. Donne
or Ambrose Phillips. But in the pages
of Boswell he lives and moves. We hear
him speak. We see him eat and gobble.
We catch the echoes of his elephantine
tread in Fleet–street and Bolt–court. We
listen to the outflow of his strong common
sense; his keen, practical, worldly wisdom;
his high morality; his solid, rather than
brilliant, wit; his heavy humour; his
crushing sarcasm; his harmless prejudice;
and his rough but kindly naturalness
of heart and disposition. Never
was so life–like a portrait drawn by
any artist in the world. Though he
appears, like the ghost of Hamlet's father,
"in his habit as he lived," he by no means
appears like a ghost—thin, shadowy, and
unsubstantial—but as a creature of flesh
and blood, of brawn and bones hidden
under his garments, a gladiator whose
strength one might borrow to wrestle with
and overthrow an antagonist. Samuel
Johnson was the author of many works
that no one cares to read; but Boswell was.
the author of "Samuel Johnson," a work
which everybody has read, or will read,
and which will never perish except with
the language. Thus has Scotland been
avenged upon her detractor.

But why Johnson should have made
Scotland and the Scotch his favourite
aversion, has long been a puzzle. Bishop
Percy, editor of the Reliques of Ancient
English poetry, declares that the doctor's
invectives against Scotland were uttered more
in sport and pleasantry, than from any real
hatred or malignity. John Wilson Croker,
the latest and best editor of Boswell,
expressed his wonder at the extreme
animosity of Johnson against the Scotch, and
thought it all the more surprising, as Johnson
was a Jacobite." I have, "he added,.
"a strong suspicion that there was some
personal cause for this unwarrantable
antipathy." Boswell's opinion was also to the
effect that there were personal reasons in
the case, though the reasons he alleges
were not very creditable either to the