Page:Studies of a Biographer 1.djvu/148

 Boswell is thus always playing at being something else, a melancholy philosopher or a virtuous judge or patriot; when he heard music, as he told Johnson, he felt himself 'plunging into the thick of the battle'; and after too convivial an evening, he retired in imagination to the deserts and adopted Rousseau's ideal 'savage state.' Still, as nobody appreciated more heartily the actual and solid pleasures of life, he could never detach himself from the world, though he did become disqualified for success. He could always restore his complacency by virtuous resolutions, and the friendship of good-natured people, and roamed through Vanity Fair lingering at every booth and distracted between the charms of every variety of enjoyment. He was precisely in the humour, therefore, to become a disciple of Johnson. For Johnson was the professor of a science which at that period was most flourishing. He was devoted, as he and his friends would have said, to the study of human nature. He was a 'moralist,' not meaning, as we might now mean, that he held any particular theories about 'hedonism' or 'self-realisation,' but that he was always observing concrete human beings, their eccentricities and miseries and varieties of