teristics. When reading, especially about some of the other famous talkers, Coleridge's monologues or Sydney Smith's explosions of fun, I find myself thinking how they would have sounded at the Mitre or the Turk's Head. Thanks to Boswell, I take the Johnsonian article to be a fixed datum like the official yard at the Tower; and to be asked to put that out of my head is to be invited to deprive myself of my only measuring-rod. It is exceedingly difficult, at any rate, to put oneself outside of Boswell and to construct a portrait of Johnson simply out of such other materials as are here put together. I have read Hawkins and Mrs. Piozzi and the rest, but always with the help of the preconceived notions. Where they could be fitted into Boswell, I have accepted them as corroborations; but when they differed, I have probably rejected the uncongenial elements, with a perhaps careless assumption that they must be inaccurate. And yet, it seems only justice to these respectable persons to consider whether we ought not to reopen the point. If Mme. d'Arblay saw something of Johnson which was not revealed to Boswell, may we not discover similar supplementary hints in the other attempts at portraiture?
