that of an undeviating narrative in chronological order of one man's
life; it grows rather out of a single dominating personality exhibited
in all the vicissitudes of a manifold career. Boswell often speaks of
his work as a painting, a portrait, and of single incidents as pictures
or scenes in a drama. His eye is keen for contrasts, for picturesque
moments, for dramatic action. While it is always the same Johnson whom
he makes the central figure, he studies to shift the background, the
interlocutors, the light and shade, in search of new revelations and
effects. He presents a succession of many scenes, exquisitely wrought,
of Johnson amid widely various settings of Eighteenth-Century England.
And subject and setting are so closely allied that each borrows charm
and emphasis from the other. Let the devoted reader of Boswell ask
himself what glamor would fade from the church of St. Clement Danes,
from the Mitre, from Fleet Street, the Oxford coach, and Lichfield,
if the burly figure were withdrawn from them; or what charm and
illumination, of the man himself would have been lost apart from these
settings. It is the unseen hand of the artist Boswell that has wrought
them inseparably into this reciprocal effect.

The single scenes and pictures which Boswell has given us will all of
them bear close scrutiny for their precision, their economy of means,
their lifelikeness, their artistic effect. None was wrought more
beautifully, nor more ardently, than that of Johnson's interview with
the King. First we see the plain massive figure of the scholar amid the
elegant comfort of Buckingham House. He is intent on his book before the
fire. Then the approach of the King, lighted on his way by Mr. Barnard
with candles caught from a table; their entrance by a private door, with
Johnson's unconscious absorption, his sudden surprise, his starting up,
his dignity, the King's ease with him, their conversation, in which the
King courteously draws from Johnson knowledge of that in which Johnson