I was glad to see the Times leader on the
two-hundredth anniversary of Boswell's birth—a date that even in these days of stress should not go unnoted. For even Macaulay, who belittled Boswell so dogmatically, agreed that he was the author of the greatest biography in the English language, and disparage him as you may as a mere runner-round after his hero and jotter-down of his hero's apothegms and dogmas, you cannot in decency dismiss like that a man who was the friend not only of Johnson, but of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Burke and Garrick, and moved and talked with them on equal terms. But in fact what Boswell was is not worth arguing about. In giving the world Boswell's Life of yohnson he has laid the world under an incalculable debt. His performance dwarfs his personality, but that still leaves room for his personality to be considerable. The day in 1767 when Bozzy first saw and spoke to the Great Cham in the back-parlour behind Davies, the actor-bookseller's, shop in Russell Street, Covent Garden, deserves commemoration even more than the day of Boswell's birth. We might remember that twenty-three years hence.
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