eminence in spite of their weaknesses. Boswell attained it by reason of
his weaknesses. If he had not been a great fool, he would never have
been a great writer. Without all the qualities which made him the jest
and the torment of those among whom he lived, without the officiousness,
the inquisitiveness, the effrontery, the toad-eating, the insensibility
to all reproof, he never could have produced so excellent a book. He was
a slave, proud of his servitude, a Paul Pry, convinced that his own
curiosity and garrulity were virtues, an unsafe companion who never
scrupled to repay the most liberal hospitality by the basest violation
of confidence, a man without delicacy, without shame, without sense
enough to know when he was hurting the feelings of others, or when he
was exposing himself to derision; and because he was all this, he has,
in an important department of literature, immeasurably surpassed such
writers as Tacitus, Clarendon, Alfieri, and his own idol Johnson.

Of the talents which ordinarily raise men to eminence as writers
Boswell had absolutely none. There is not in all his books a single
remark of his own on literature, politics, religion, or society which is
not either commonplace or absurd. His dissertations on hereditary
gentility, on the slave-trade, and on the entailing of landed estates,
may serve as examples. To say that these passages are sophistical would
be to pay them an extravagant compliment. They have no pretence to
argument, or even to meaning. He has reported innumerable observations
made by himself in the course of conversation. Of those observations we
do not remember one which is above the intellectual capacity of a boy of
fifteen. He has printed many of his own letters, and in these letters he
is always ranting or twaddling. Logic, eloquence, wit, taste, all those
things which are generally considered as making a book valuable, were
utterly wanting to him. He had, indeed, a quick observation and a
retentive memory. These qualities, if he had been a man of sense and