interest in every trait of his hero, large and small, is so strong
that he had none of that stiff propriety or chilly reserve which
mars almost all English biographies. He did not care a straw
whether this characteristic or that would redound to Johnson's
credit. He saw that Johnson was a large-minded, large-hearted man,
with an astonishing power of conversational expression, and an
extremely picturesque figure as well. He perceived that he was big
enough to be described in full, and that the shadows of his
temperament only brought out the finer features into prominence.

Since the days of Johnson there are but two Englishmen whose lives
we know in anything like the same detail--Ruskin and Carlyle. We
know the life of Ruskin mainly from his own power of impassioned
autobiography, and because he had the same sort of power of
exhibiting both his charm and his weakness as Boswell had in
dealing with Johnson. But Ruskin was not at all a typical
Englishman; he had a very feminine side to his character, and
though he was saved from sentimentality by his extreme trenchancy,
and by his irritable temper, yet his whole temperament is
beautiful, winning, attractive, rather than salient and
picturesque. He had the qualities of a poet, a quixotic ideal, and
an exuberant fancy; but though his spell over those who understand
him is an almost magical one, his point of view is bound to be
misunderstood by the ordinary man.

Carlyle's case is a different one again. There the evidence is
mainly documentary. We know more about the Carlyle interior than we
know of the history of any married pair since the world began.
There is little doubt that if Carlyle could have had a Boswell, a
biographer who could have rendered the effect of his splendid power