Page:Studies of a Biographer 1.djvu/122

 relevant matter. Perhaps Johnson's 'Prayers and Meditations,' not here quite in their place, might have made way for samples of his fun.

The problem indeed which the book principally suggests concerns this question of the completeness of the Boswellian Johnson. To some of us—I suspect, indeed, to a good many—Boswell represents the original source not only of knowledge about Johnson, but of our knowledge of English literature in general. He was our introducer to the great anonymous club formed by English men of letters from the days when Shakespeare met Ben Jonson to the days when Carlyle discoursed to Froude. We became members of the craft in spirit under Boswell's guidance, whether we have or have not become actually identified with it in the flesh. It therefore becomes next to impossible to abstract from Boswell: all our later knowledge has been more or less ingrafted upon him, however far we may have travelled from the source: Boswell gave the nucleus: and more or less consciously we have used his world as a standard inevitably taken into account in all later judgments. To suppose Boswell non-existent is for such readers to suppose a kind of organic change in our whole estimate of literary