It was this perfect preservation of the powers of his mind that rendered death so terrible to him to the last. 'I struggle hard for life,' he writes, 'I try to hold up my head as high as I can;' and again, 'I will be conquered; I will not capitulate.' Some one told him of a wonderful learned pig, and when 'a person who was present pro▾ ceeded to remark that great torture must have been employed ere the indocility of the animal could have been subdued, "Certainly" (said the Doctor), "but " (turning to me), "how old is your pig?" I told him three years old. "Then," said he, "the pig has no cause to complain; he would have been killed the first year if he had not been educated, and protracted existence is a good recompense for very considerable degrees of torture." Who can forget

the stern strength of mind the old man showed in the last day of his life when, thinking that the surgeons, out of fear of giving him pain, would not cut deep enough, he called for a case of lancets and operated upon himself? Nay even, 'soon after he got at a pair of scissors that lay in a drawer by him, and plunged them deep into the calf of each leg.'

The longer he lived the more attractive did the world seem to him. He had kept his friendship in constant repair, to quote his own expressive words. The retired and uncourtly scholar whose shoes had been laughed at

by the Christ Church men, who had come to London poor and unknown, whose surly virtue had often wanted a friend; who 'in the gloom of solitude,' had thirty years before brought out his great work, now found himself courted by the great, whose rank, if only joined with decency of life, he had always so deeply respected. The friends of his daily life were some of the greatest men that England could then boast of; who, great though they were, looked upon him not as their equal but as their chief. What more splendid homage was ever paid to any man than to him, to whom when Burke and Reynolds and Gibbon and Sheridan wished to present a petition, they only ventured to send it in the form of a Round Robin? He relished fame, and he was famous.

'He called to us,' as Boswell writes in describing a Club meeting a short while before his death,—' he called to us with a sudden air of exultation as the thought started into his mind, "Oh! gentlemen, I must tell you a very great thing. The Empress of Russia has ordered the 'Rambler' to be translated into the Russian language; so I shall be read on the banks of the Wolga. boasts that his fame would extend as far as the banks of the Rhone; now the Wolga is farther from me than the Rhone was from Horace." Boswell: "You must cer

Horace

tainly be pleased with this, Sir." Johnson: "I am pleased, Sir, to be sure. A man is pleased to find he has succeeded in that which he has endeavoured to do."" London life had lost to him none of its charms. When a

man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.' And when in the last autumn that he was ever to see, he had gone into the country in the hope that change of air and scene might do something for him, worn with suffering it is not to the rest of the grave or to some better world that he looks forward. 'The town,' he writes, 'is my element; there are my friends, there are my books, to which I have not yet bidden farewell; and there are my amusements.' He had, too often in his long life, with good reason to own himself a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.' Yet we please ourselves with the strong belief that he who had so large a share of some of the noblest qualities with which man is endowed, had also no small share of that happiness which here on earth can fall to the lot of man.

L

CHAPTER III.

MR. CARLYLE ON BOSWELL.1

IN the whole of literature there is scarcely a stronger contrast to be found than that which exists between the two celebrated reviews of Boswell's 'Life of Johnson.' Lord Macaulay was, I think, carried by his love of paradox and his hatred of Tories as far wrong in one direction, as Mr. Carlyle by his love of hero-worship and his utter indifference both to Whigs and Tories was carried in another direction. There are those who imagine that between two opposite characters that are given of the same man a kind of balance can be struck, which shall not be far removed from the truth. Character, however, admits of such infinite variety that it may well happen that the truth lies not between any two opposing views, but in some altogether different direction. Though the study of both Boswell and Johnson as drawn by

1 Reprinted (with alterations) from the Saturday Review, November 28, 1874.

these two great writers is very interesting, yet I doubt whether in their pages there is to be found, even by a man who is well skilled in weighing arguments and balancing opposing statements, an accurate estimate of the two men.

Macaulay had represented Boswell as everything that was contemptible and mean. It was no hard matter to upset this outrageous view; and Mr. Carlyle has done it most thoroughly. Even he, in some points, has not done full justice to Boswell's character. however, he has exaggerated his merits.

In one respect,

Loyalty, discipleship,' he writes, all that was ever meant by Heroworship, lives perennially in the human bosom, and waits, even in these dead days, only for occasions to unfold it, and inspire all men with it, and again make the world alive! James Boswell we can regard as a practical witness, or real martyr, to this high, everlasting truth.' Now the more hidden the hero is, the less recognised by the world, the greater is the merit of the disciple who discovers him and establishes his worship. Mr. Carlyle, I hold, exalts Boswell's merits by lowering the position` which Johnson held at the time when the two first became acquainted. At the date,' he writes, 'when Johnson was a poor, rusty-coated "scholar," dwelling in Temple Lane, and indeed throughout their whole inter

6