It is thanks largely to the work of James Boswell that we possess one of the finest bodies of strong opinion ever to exist in English letters—that of Dr Samuel Johnson, who could be relied upon to fulminate upon almost any matter under the 18th-century sun without, it seems, even pausing for breath.
To pick just one example from the riches of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson—which was first published in 1791, some six years after Johnson's death—here is the doctor in full flow on the topic of Thomas Gray [1716-1771], the poet and author of "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard":
Next day I [i.e. Boswell] dined with Johnson at Mr. Thrale's. He attacked Gray, calling him "a dull fellow." BOSWELL: "I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry." JOHNSON: "Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull every where. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet."It's delightful stuff, especially in comparison to a modern literary scene which often seems to have no gradations of attitude between blandishment and obscenity. We should be at least a little careful of Boswell's Johnson, however. As Horace Walpole noted in a letter of 26th May 1791, discussing the insulting of Gray, among others, by Boswell's new book:
…it is a new kind of libel, by which you may abuse any body, by saying some dead body said so and so of somebody alive.Dr Johnson, he concluded, was not so much misrepresented as selectively reported by his disciple—for whom Walpole expresses a less than complete admiration:
Often, indeed, Johnson made the most brutal speeches to living persons; for though he was good-natured at bottom, he was very ill-natured at top. He loved to dispute, to show his superiority. If his opponents were weak, he told them they were fools; if they vanquished him, he was scurrilous—to nobody more than to Boswell himself, who was contemptible for flattering him so grossly, and for enduring the coarse things he was continually vomiting on Boswell's own country, Scotland.In fact, so little of worth besides the great biography was achieved by Boswell (who distinguished himself in later years by writing a satirical poem against the abolition of slavery) that it's one of literature's enduring mysteries he managed to produce the thing at all.
