of conversation, we might have had a book which could have been put
on the same level as the life of Johnson, because Carlyle again was
pre-eminently a "figure," a man made by nature to hold the
enraptured attention of a circle. But it would have been a much
more difficult task to represent Carlyle's talk than it was to
represent Johnson's, because Carlyle was an inspired soliloquist,
and supplied both objection and repartee out of his own mind. I
think it probable that Carlyle was a typical Scotchman; he was more
impassioned in his seriousness than Johnson, but he had a grimness
which Johnson did not possess, and he had not Johnson's good-
natured tolerance for foolish and well-meaning people. Carlyle
himself had a good deal of Boswell's own gift, a power of minute
and faithful observation, and a memory which treasured and
reproduced characteristic details. If Carlyle had ever had the time
or the taste to admire any human being as Boswell admired Johnson,
he might have produced fully as great a book; but Carlyle had a
prophetic impulse, an instinct for inverting tubs and preaching
from them, a desire for telling the whole human race what to do and
how to do it, which Johnson was too modest to claim.

There is but one other instance that I know in English literature
of a man who had the Boswellian gift to the full, but who never had
complete scope, and that was Hogg. If Hogg could have spent more of
his life with Shelley, and had been allowed to complete his book,
we might, I believe, have had a monument of the same kind.

But in the case of Boswell and Johnson, it is Boswell's magnificent
scorn of reticence which has done the trick, like the spurt of
acid, of which Browning speaks in one of his best similes. The
final stroke of genius which has established the Life of Johnson so