3-082-849 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The Boswell Centenary: James Boswell, 1895. Diarist and author of "Life of Samuel Johnson". 'No man had a keener relish for the pleasures of life than Boswell; yet, in these days of his hot youth...he sat up four nights in one week working at his journal...It was in 1763 that he first met Johnson; not till 1791 was his Magnum Opus, as he delighted to call it, given to the world...He likes praise, he likes to be talked about, he likes to know great people...He is entirely free from hypocrisy...He was, in truth, as he liked to call himself, "a very universal man," "a citizen of the world."...Wherever Boswell went he rapidly made friends. He was a man of genius, but of that happy genius which is never oppressive...It was for him that Johnson invented the word clubbable. He once said to him: "Boswell, I think I am easier with you than with almost anybody." "Sir," he said to a friend, "if I were to lose Boswell it would be a limb amputated." "He was," he maintained, "the best travelling companion in the world," he promised "to celebrate his good-humour and perpetual cheerfulness," as shown in their tour to the Hebrides. In truth Boswell had that "most pleasing of all qualities, perpetual gaiety"...He died...one hundred years ago, on May 19, 1795'. From "Illustrated London News", 1895.