securely in the hearts of English readers, lies in the fact that
Boswell has given us something to compassionate. As a rule the
biographer cannot bear to evoke the smallest pity for his hero. The
absence of female relatives in the case of Johnson was probably a
part of his good fortune. No biographer likes, and seldom dares, to
torture the sensibilities of a great man's widow and daughters. And
the strength as well as the weakness of the feminine point of view
is that women have a power not so much of not observing, as of
actually obliterating the weaknesses of those whom they love. It is
sentiment which ruins biographies, the sentiment that cannot bear
the truth.

Boswell did not shrink from admitting the reader to a sight of
Johnson's hypochondria, his melancholy fears, his dreary miseries,
his dread of illness, his terror of death. Johnson's horror of
annihilation was insupportable. He so revelled in life, in the
contact and company of other human beings, that he once said that
the idea of an infinity of torment was preferable to the thought of
annihilation. He wrote, in his last illness, to his old friend Dr.
Taylor:


"Oh! my friend, the approach of death is very dreadful. I am afraid
to think on that which I know I cannot avoid. It is vain to look
round and round for that help which cannot be had. Yet we hope and
hope, and fancy that he who has lived to-day may live to-morrow.
But let us learn to derive our hope only from God.

"In the meantime, let us be kind to one another. I have no friend
now living but you and Mr. Hector that was the friend of my youth.--