Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SELECTIONS FROM CARLYLE'S ESSAY, THE HERO AS MAN OF LETTERS When John Wilson Crocker's edition of Boswell's Life of fjamuel Johnson was published in 1831, Thomas Carl vle wrote an essay, in 1832, for Frazer'a (lffaille, commenting on the edition. It later appeared in Heroes and Hero Worttliip. Following are some selections from the essay: Boswell was a person whose mean or bad qualities lay open to the general eye. That he was a wine-bibber and gross liver is undeniable enough. That he was vain, heedless, a babbler; had much of the sycophant, alternating with the braggadocio, curiously spiced too with an all-pervading dash of coxcomb; that he gloried much when the tailor, by a court-suit, had made a new man of him; and that he appeared at the Shakespeare Jubilee with a riband imprinted, Corsica Boswell, round his hat: all this unhappily is evident as the sun at noon. The very look of Boswell seems to have signified so much. In that cocked nose, cocked partly in triumph over his weaker fellow-creatures; in those bag-cheeks, hanging like half-filled wineskins; in that coarsely-protruded shelf-mouth, that fat dew-lapped chin: in all this, who does not see sensuality, pretension, boisterous imbecility enough; much that could not have been ornamental in the temper of a great man's overfed great man (what the Scotch name flunky), though it had been more natural there? The under part of Boswell's face is of a low, almost brutish character. Unfortunately, on the other hand, what great and genuine good lay in him was no wise so self- evident. That Boswell was a hunter after spiritual notabilities, that he loved such, and longed, and even crept and crawled to be near them, we account a very singular merit. The man had an open sense, an open loving heart, which so few have: ...