side, before which a few apples were laid. He was reading. I asked him what book he had got. He said the History of Birmingham. Local histories, I observed, were generally dull. ‘It is true, sir, but this has a peculiar merit with me; for I passed some of my early years, and married my wife there.’ I supposed the apples were preparing as medicine. ‘Why, no, sir; I believe they are only there because I want something to do. These are some of the solitary expedients to which we are driven by sickness. I have been confined this week past; and here you find me roasting apples, and reading the History of Birmingham.’
Boswell knew Johnson during only a single period of his life—a period of established pre-eminence and prosperity. Even so, he knew him chiefly in one aspect, as the great Cham of literature, taking his ease among his courtiers, and basking in the sunshine of his late-won success. He never knew him as Mrs. Thrale knew him in the every-day round of domestic life; nor as Goldsmith and Sir Joshua Reynolds knew him a fellow-craftsman to be treated on terms of equality and brotherhood; nor as Hannah More and Frances Burney knew him—playful, gentle, nonsensical, and protective. Least of all did he know him as Savage knew him—a young and proud man, stoical and ambitious, happy to be the disciple and confidant of an acknowledged poet, who could encourage him in his ideas and schemes for the future. All these, in many ways, knew Johnson better than Boswell knew him. But Boswell has distanced them all, in spite of their advantages, not because he was a fool, as Macaulay thinks, but because he loved Johnson better than they did. The Life is a monument to an affection that was almost a passion. Savage was
