In his tour to the Hebrides he was welcomed by the great people wherever there were great people to welcome him. Setting aside the Scotch judges, many of whom were men of good family and received him hospitably, and the Scottish lairds, whom Mr. Carlyle describes as the hungriest and vainest of all bipeds yet known, but who were as warm in their welcome as the judges, he was hospitably received by the Earl of Errol, the Duke of Argyle, the Earl of Loudoun, and the Countess of Eglintoun. 'The Earl of Errol put Dr. Johnson in mind of their having dined together in London.' At Inverary 'the Duke placed Dr. Johnson next to him at dinner. The Duchess was very attentive to him. He talked a great deal, and was so entertaining that Lady Betty Hamilton, after dinner, went and placed her chair close to his, leaned upon the back of it, and listened eagerly. He did not know all the while how much he was honoured.' When the Earl of Loudoun heard that Johnson would dine with him, Boswell's servant reported that he jumped for joy.' 'We were received with a most pleasing courtesy by his Lordship, and by the Countess his mother, who in her ninety-fifth year had all her faculties quite unimpaired.' At the Countess of Eglintoun's 'in the course of our conversation it came out that she was married the year before Dr. Johnson was

born, upon which she graciously said to him that she might have been his mother, and that she now adopted him; and when we were going away she embraced him, saying, "My dear son, farewell."' In London 'he associated,' as Boswell tells us, 'with persons the most widely different in manners, abilities, rank, and accomplishments. He was at once the companion of the brilliant Colonel Forrester of the Guards, who wrote "The Polite Philosopher," and of the awkward and uncouth Robert Levett; of Lord Thurlow and Mr. Sastres, the Italian master; and has dined one day with the beautiful, gay, and fascinating Lady Craven, and the next with good Mrs. Gardiner, the tallow-chandler on Snow Hill.' Mr. Fitzgerald, in his edition of Boswell, quoting from Rogers's 'Table Talk,' says Mr. Rogers was told by Lady Lucan that her mother, Lady Spencer, used to say, "Now, child, we have nothing to do to-night; let us bring home Dr. Johnson to dinner." Boswell says that at the house of Lord and Lady Lucan he often enjoyed all that an elegant house and the best company can contribute to form happiness.' But Bennet Langton's account of the party at Mrs. Vesey's, where the company, in which there were two duchesses, half a dozen or so of lords and ladies, whom he names, and ' others of note both for their station and understanding,

began to collect round Johnson till they became not less than four, if not five, deep,' is in itself proof enough that Johnson was regarded by the great.

I cannot admit, then, the claim made for Boswell that he, and he alone, last century was a real martyr to the high, everlasting truth that hero-worship lives perennially in the human bosom. If the age in which he lived was ' a decrepit, death-sick era, when Cant had first decisively opened her poison-breathing lips to proclaim that Godworship and Mammon-worship were one and the same, that Life was a Lie,' &c., it was at all events the age of Goldsmith, Burke, Reynolds, and the gentle Bennet Langton, each of whom rivalled Boswell in the high esteem and the deep affection which they felt for Samuel Johnson.

CHAPTER IV.

LORD MACAULAY ON BOSWELL.1

Ir is strange how a man of Macaulay's common sense, wide reading, and knowledge of the world could have fallen into such a rhetorical passion with Boswell. It would be almost as reasonable if a writer were to set about to belabour the memory of Sir Toby Belch as a man who had lost all self-respect.

Boswell, I should have thought, had sufficiently guarded himself against such an attack by the story he applies to himself in his dedication of the 'Life' to Sir Joshua Reynolds. He complains that he had been misunderstood when, in his 'Tour to the Hebrides,' in his eagerness to display the fertility and readiness of Johnson's wit, he freely showed to the world its dexterity, even when he himself was the object of it.

' In writing this chapter I have made some use of articles published in the Saturday Review, June 20, 1874, and the Pall Mall Gazette, October 13, 1875.

He goes on to say, 'It is related of the great Dr. Clarke that, when in one of his leisure hours, he was unbending himself with a few friends in the most playful and frolicksome manner, he observed Beau Nash approaching; upon which he suddenly stopped. "My boys," said he, "let us be grave; here comes a fool." It is well for the world that Boswell had none of that second sight in which he was very willing to believe, or he might have spoiled his book by often stopping suddenly in his narrative with the exclamation, 'Let me be grave! I see coming from afar an Edinburgh Reviewer.'

His faults—and they were certainly very great-were not such as to raise either anger or contempt. A correspondent of Malone's described him well when he said 'he was an amiable, warm-hearted fellow, and there was a simplicity in him very engaging.' Hume, who was no bad judge of a man, wrote of him as 'a young gentleman very good humoured, very agreeable, and very mad.' Adam Smith, if we may trust Boswell, had told him when he was quite a young man that he was 'happily possessed of a facility of manners.' Rousseau recommended him to Pascal Paoli, and Paoli, after he had had him as his guest, in writing to him told him he should be desirous to keep up a correspondence with him. Hannah More speaks of him as a very agreeable, good-natured man.' Cumber

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