Selections From James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Selections From James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson

The rising generation is, it may be feared, better acquainted with Macaulay’s travesty of Boswell and of Johnson than with the great originals which he so flagrantly traduced. Boswell’s book is very long (it contains more than half a million words); large parts of it assume familiarity with Latin; and the beginning of the book is much less attractive than the rest. The present editor, who attacked it at a tender age, was deterred partly by the perplexing mass of Croker’s notes, partly also by the long quotations and lists of conjectural attributions; and after wander ing for a space in those crepuscular regions, forsook the journey before the sun was up.

If any apology is required for making a selection from a work in its nature discontinuous, the authority may be cited of Johnson himself; who was at first angry with Bishop Hurd for publishing a mutilated Cowley, but afterwards relenting allowed that ‘there is no impropriety in a man’s publishing as much as he chooses of any authour, if he does not put the rest out of the way’.

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