time when biographers in general thought it a duty even to alter such contemporary documents as they had; and to give without warning, as Mason did in the case of Gray, or even Lord Sheffield in the case of Gibbon, not the actual letter, but a compound of different letters. Even Boswell indeed, as appears from his notebook, thought himself at liberty to touch up phrases, though he may have thought that he was bringing rough notes nearer to the truth. But it is plain that this was only one condition of his success. Most proverbial good sayings, one is inclined to suspect, are partly due to the reporters, or rather to generations of reporters. They have been smoothed and polished like pebbles on a beach by continuous attrition in the mouths of men, and if we could see them in their original enunciation they would be comparatively rough and clumsy. On the other hand, the detached witticism loses, and may entirely change, its significance when taken as an isolated gem. The special skill of Boswell is in his power of giving, not the felicitous phrase by itself, but the dramatic situation in which it was struck out, and to which, even in its unpolished state, it owed its impressiveness. In that he is not only superlative but, I fancy,
