Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

folio volume, which makes the anecdote more literary and also testifies to Johnson’s great physical strength, for such manuscripts are difficult to handle, especially in the middle of a fight.
    Johnson agreed, let us say, to an interview with the prime minister, who then, with great tact, sounded him out on the subject and assured him that he would be granted a pension, of three hundred pounds sterling a year, a considerable sum at the time: not for what he would do—which meant that the state would not be buying Johnson—but rather for what he had
already
done. Johnson was grateful for the honor and more or less made it understood that they could grant him the pension without danger of provoking a hostile reaction from him. I don’t know if I mentioned or not that centuries later,Kipling was offered the position of poet laureate, and Kipling did not want it, even though he was a personal friend to the king. He said that if he accepted that honor, his freedom to criticize the government when it behaved badly would be curtailed. Moreover, Kipling surely thought that being named poet laureate would add nothing to his literary fame. Johnson accepted the pension, which caused many to satirize him. Nobody failed to remember his definition of a pension, and later in a bookstore something took place that was undoubtedly of little importance to him at the moment. Generally, the important events in our lives seem trivial when they take place and only later take on importance.
    Johnson was in a bookstore when he met a young man named James Boswell. This young man was born in Edinburgh in 1740 and died in the year 1795. He was the son of a judge. In Scotland, judges were given the title of Lord and could choose the place they wanted to be lord of. Boswell’s father had a small castle that was in ruins. Scotland is full of castles in ruins, poor castles in the Highlands of Scotland, and as opposed to the castles of the Rhine, which suggest an opulent life with small but more or less lavish courts, these don’t, they give the impression of a life of battle, of difficult battles against the English. The castle was called Auchinleck. Boswell’s father, then, was Lord Auchinleck and so was his son. But this wasn’t, let us say, a native title, from birth, but rather a judicial title. Now, even though Boswell showed an interest in letters, his parents wanted him to go into law. He studied in Edinburgh and then for more than two years at Utretcht University in Holland. This was customary at that time: to study at several universities, in the British Isles and on the continent. It could be said that Boswell had a premonition of his destiny. LikeMilton knew that he would be a poet before he had written a single line, Boswell always felt he would be the biographer of a great man of his era. So he visitedVoltaire; he tried to approach the great men of his time. He visited Voltaire in Berne, in Switzerland, and he made friends with Jean-JacquesRousseau—they were friends for only fifteen or twenty days, because Rousseau was a very ill-tempered man—and then he became friends with an Italian general,Paoli, from Corsica. 3 And when he returned to England, he wrote a book about Corsica, and at a party given in Stratford-upon-Avon to celebrate the birth of Shakespeare, he showed up dressed as a Corsican villager. So that people would recognize him as the author of the book about Corsica, he carried a sign on his hat, on which he had written “Corsica’s Boswell,” and we know this because of his own testimony and that of his contemporaries.
    Johnson felt a special antagonism toward the Scots, so young Boswell introducing himself as a Scot did not work in his favor. I don’t remember right now the name of the owner of the bookstore, but I know that a friend of Johnson’s said he could not imagine anything more humiliating for the man than the fact that the bookstore owner patted him on the shoulder. 4 a> Of course, this didn’t happen at their first meeting; Johnson would not have allowed it. And Johnson spoke badly of Scotland, and then he complained about Boswell’s friendGarrick, the famous actor David Garrick; and he said that Garrick had refused to give tickets to a lady friend of his. He was acting in a Shakespeare play, I don’t know which one. And then Boswell said, “I can’t believe Garrick would have acted in such a mean fashion.” Now, Johnson spoke badly of Garrick, but he would not allow others to do so. It