He had, too, that sobriety of character in which his son was so conspicuously wanting. "His age, his office, and his character, had given him an acknowledged claim to great attention in whatever company he was, and he could ill brook any diminution of it." He was by no means deficient in humour, and in this respect father and son were alike. "He had a great many good stories, which he told uncommonly well, and he was remarkable for 'humour, incolumi gravitate,' as Lord Monboddo used to characterize it."
The contrast between his dignity and gravity, and Boswell's bustling and most comical liveliness, must have been as amusing as it was striking. His ignorance of his son's genius, and the contempt for him which he did not conceal, heightened the picture. Johnson's presence would have greatly added to the interest of the scene, for Boswell must have constantly wavered between his admiration of his idol and his awe of his father. A few years later Miss Burney met Boswell at Streatham, and thus describes him, no doubt with a good deal of exaggeration:
"He spoke the Scotch accent strongly. He had an odd mock solemnity of manner, that he had acquired imperceptibly from constantly thinking of and imitating Dr. Johnson. There was something slouching in his gait and dress, that wore an air, ridiculously enough, of purporting to personify the same model. His clothes were always too large for him; his hair or wig was constantly in a state of negligence; and he never for a moment sat still or upright upon a chair. When he met with Dr. Johnson he commonly forbore even answering anything that was said, or attending to anything that went forward, lest he should miss the smallest sound from that voice to which he paid such exclusive homage. His eyes goggled with eagerness; he leant his ear almost on the shoulder of the Doctor; and his mouth dropt open to catch every syllable that might be uttered. The Doctor generally treated him as a schoolboy, whom without the smallest ceremony he pardoned or rebuked alternately."[1]
It is probable that this description is heightened by Miss Burney's wounded vanity. Boswell had not read her Evelina, and when he was reproached by Johnson with being a Brangton—one of the characters in the novel—he did not know what was meant. She was as careful in recording the conversation that was about herself as Boswell was in recording Johnson's. Her great hero was herself. The voices to which she paid her homage were those in which she was praised and flattered.
In another place she describes "the singularity of his comic-serious face and manner."[2] He himself has more than once drawn
