Indeed I cannot conceive a more perfect mode of writing any man's life, than not only relating all the most important events of it in their order, but interweaving what he privately wrote, and said, and thought; by which mankind are enabled as it were to see him live, and to 'live o'er each scene[1]' with him, as he actually advanced through the several stages of his life. Had his other friends been as diligent and ardent as I was, he might have been almost entirely preserved. As it is, I will venture to say that he will be seen in this work more completely than any man who has ever yet lived[2]
And he will be seen as he really was; for I profess to write, not his panegyrick, which must be all praise, but his Life; which, great and good as he was, must not be supposed to be entirely perfect. To be as he was, is indeed subject of panegyrick enough to any man in this state of being; but in every picture there should be shade as well as light, and when I delineate him without reserve, I do what he himself recommended, both by his precept and his example[3]
'If the biographer writes from personal knowledge, and makes haste to gratify the publick curiosity, there is danger lest his
- ↑ Pope's Prologue to Addison's Cato, 1. 4.
- ↑ ' . . . Boswell is the first of biographers. He has distanced all his competitors so decidedly that it is not worth while to place them. Eclipse is first, and the rest nowhere.' Macaulay's Essays, i. 374.
- ↑ See post, Sept. 17. 1777. and Malone's note of March 15, 1781, and Boswell's Hebrides, Sept. 22. 1773. Hannah More met Boswell when he was carrying through the press his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides. 'Boswell tells me,' she writes, 'he is printing anecdotes of Johnson, not his Life, but, as he has the vanity to call it, yen's, pyramid. I besought his tenderness for our virtuous and most revered departed friend, and begged he would mitigate some of his asperities. He said roughly: "He would not cut ofi his claws, nor make a tiger a cat, to please anybody." It will, I doubt not, be a very amusing book. but. I hope, not an indiscreet one; he has great enthusiasm and some fire.' H. More's Memoirs, i. 403.
versations, is the most perfect that can be conceived, and will be more of a Life than any work that has ever yet appeared." Letters of Boswell, p. 265.
