great friend's wit, ill-humor, wisdom, affection, or goodness. He never
spares himself, except now and then to assume a somewhat diaphanous
anonymity. Without regard for his own dignity, he exhibits himself as
humiliated, or drunken, or hypochondriac, or inquisitive, or resorting
to petty subterfuge--anything for the accomplishment of his one main
purpose. 'Nay, Sir,' said Johnson, 'it was not the wine that made your
head ache, but the sense that I put into it.' 'What, Sir,' asks the
hapless Boswell, 'will sense make the head ache?' 'Yes, Sir, when it is
not used to it.'

Boswell is also the artist in his regard for truth. In him it was a
passion. Again and again he insists upon his authenticity. He developed
an infallible gust and unerring relish of what was genuinely Johnsonian
in speech, writing, or action; and his own account leads to the
inference that he discarded, as worthless, masses of diverting material
which would have tempted a less scrupulous writer beyond resistance. 'I
observed to him,' said Boswell, 'that there were very few of his friends
so accurate as that I could venture to put down in writing what they
told me as his sayings.' The faithfulness of his portrait, even to
the minutest details, is his unremitting care, and he subjects all
contributed material to the sternest criticism.

Industry and love of truth alone will not make the artist. With only
these Boswell might have been merely a tireless transcriber. But he
had besides a keen sense of artistic values. This appears partly in the
unity of his vast work. Though it was years in the making, though the
details that demanded his attention were countless, yet they all centre
consistently in one figure, and are so focused upon it, that one can
hardly open the book at random to a line which has not its direct
bearing upon the one subject of the work. Nor is the unity of the book