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 a great nugget, a gigantic mass of 'human nature.' He had that article, like Carlyle, in so much abundance as to shock and alienate a good many people who shrink from the rough ore, however full it may be of precious metal. To study him, therefore, was to study a type of surpassing interest, and nobody was really freer than Boswell from what Macaulay, erroneously, I should say, called the lues Boswelliana, the unqualified admiration even of a hero's failings. He would not, as he told Hannah More, make his lion a cat to please anybody, and perceived that the shadows were necessary to do justice to the lights. But the point in which he is even more unique is the perception that Johnson, though always in the foreground, is still to be only in the foreground of a group of living and moving human beings. The dramatic skill displayed in such descriptions as the famous scene with Wilkes enables him to do what is not even approached by his rivals. It makes us incidentally share Boswell's own feeling. He comes up from Edinburgh with such a 'gust' for London society as excited even Johnson's wonder. It is not a mere search for pleasure or amusement, but a kind of scientific zeal, that animates him. He has a