fade. The sheer labor of this process, not to mention the difficulty,
can be measured only by one who attempts a similar feat. Let him try to
report the best conversation of a lively evening, following its
course, preserving its point, differentiating sharply the traits of the
participants, keeping the style, idiom, and exact words of each. Let him
reject all parts of it, however diverting, of which the charm and force
will evaporate with the occasion, and retain only that which will be as
amusing, significant, and lively as ever at the end of one hundred,
or, for all that we can see, one thousand years. He will then, in some
measure, realize the difficulty of Boswell's performance. When his work
appeared Boswell himself said: 'The stretch of mind and prompt assiduity
by which so many conversations are preserved, I myself, at some distance
of time, contemplate with wonder.'

He was indefatigable in hunting up and consulting all who had known
parts or aspects of Johnson's life which to him were inaccessible.
He mentions all told more than fifty names of men and women whom he
consulted for information, to which number many others should be added
of those who gave him nothing that he could use. 'I have sometimes been
obliged to run half over London, in order to fix a date correctly.' He
agonized over his work with the true devotion of an artist: 'You cannot
imagine,' he says, 'what labor, what perplexity, what vexation I
have endured in arranging a prodigious multiplicity of materials, in
supplying omissions, in searching for papers buried in different masses,
and all this besides the exertion of composing and polishing.' He
despairs of making his picture vivid or full enough, and of ever
realizing his preconception of his masterpiece.

Boswell's devotion to his work appears in even more extraordinary ways.
Throughout he repeatedly offers himself as a victim to illustrate his