Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

Macaulay’s comments are, in a fact, a double-edged sword. In Thomas Macaulay’s review of John Croker’s new edition of James Boswell’s
Life of Johnson
(which appeared in September 1831), Macaulay states that Boswell was an imbecile who happened to have a good memory. In spite of this, his encounter with Johnson led to the best biography every written. “We are not sure that there is in the whole history of the human intellect so strange a phænomenon as this book. Many of the greatest men that ever lived have written biography. Boswell was one of the smallest men that ever lived, and he has beaten them all. He was, if we are to give any credit to his own account or to the united testimony of all who knew him, a man of the meanest and feeblest intellect.”
    CLASS 10

1. From
Sartor Resartus
, chapter VIII: “Could anything be more miraculous than an actual authentic Ghost? The English Johnson longed, all his life, to see one; but could not, though he went to Cock Lane, and thence to the church-vaults, and tapped on coffins. Foolish Doctor! Did he never, with the mind’s eye as well as with the body’s, look round him into that full tide of human Life he so loved; did he never so much as look into Himself? The good Doctor was a Ghost, as actual and authentic as heart could wish; well-nigh a million of Ghosts were travelling the streets by his side. Once more I say, sweep away the illusion of Time; compress the threescore years into three minutes: what else was he, what else are we? Are we not Spirits, that are shaped into a body, into an Appearance; and that fade away again into air and Invisibility? This is no metaphor, it is a simple scientific
fact
: we start out of Nothingness, take figure, and are Apparitions; round us, as round the veriest spectre, is Eternity; and to Eternity minutes are as years and aeons.”
2. John Stuart (1713–92), Third Earl of Bute, British statesman born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He was the tutor and personal friend to George III. When George II acceded to the throne, he received a position in his court, and was named Secretary of State, and in 1762, Prime Minister. He quickly became very unpopular, however, and was forced to resign in 1763.
3. Pasquale di Paoli (1725–1807), leader of the struggle for Corsican independence, first against Genoa and then against France. Boswell took a six-week trip to Corsica in 1765 to interview Di Paoli, with whom he established a long friendship.
4. “Mr. Thomas Davies, the actor, who then kept a bookseller’s shop in Russell Street, Covent Garden” (
The Life of Samuel Johnson
, by James Boswell).
5. See note 12 from Class 9 above. Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron of Rothley (1800–59), English historian, politician, and essayist. Macaulay’s essay appeared in September 1831, in response to John Wilson Croker’s edition of Boswell’s biography.
6. In his 1831 review of
Life of Johnson
, Macaulay writes: “Those weaknesses which most men keep covered up in the most secret places of the mind, not to be disclosed to the eye of friendship or of love, were precisely the weaknesses which Boswell paraded before all the world. He was perfectly frank, because the weakness of his understanding and the tumult of his spirits prevented him from knowing when he made himself ridiculous.... His fame is great; and it will, we have no doubt be lasting; but it is fame of a peculiar kind, and indeed marvellously resembles infamy.”
7. The phrase “whose name I do not wish to recall” is probably a take on the first sentence of
Don Quixote.
8. Leopoldo Lugones Argüello (1874–1938) was an Argentine writer.
9. This would have been accompanied by a gesture.
10. Paul Valéry (1871–1945), French poet and critic.
11. This phrase is found in Book VIII of Pope’s translation of the
Iliad.
12. First published in two volumes in 1791 under the title
The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
13. Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92), English painter born in Devon, Great Britain. He painted portraits of important persons of his era. In 1768, Reynolds was named first president of the Royal Academy of Arts, and in 1784, Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King. Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74), Anglo-Irish playwright, novelist, and poet.
14. Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936), Spanish writer and philosopher.
15. From
All’s well that ends well
, act 4, scene 3.
16. Henri L. Bergson (1859–1941), French philosopher.
17. Joseph Wood Krutch (1893–1970), North American