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“... Johnsonians have been telling us for decades that Boswell makes an unreliable guide to the mind of his mentor. They say that one tastes Johnson’s profundity not in his conversation but in his writing, and above all in the essays on morality. In those works, says W.J. Bate, ‘we have the essence of Johnson.’ A careful reader of the life by Boswell must agree that the biographer’s genius was not intellectual: the eagle did not always carry the lark with him when he soared ...”